POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On October 28, the AAUP sent a letter, signed by President Irene Mulvey and me, to New York University president Andrew Hamilton urging him to address the academic freedom concerns raised by Zoom’s censorship of an event sponsored by the NYU AAUP and others. On November 6, we received the following…
BY HANK REICHMAN This past weekend the San Francisco Chronicle carried an article reporting that a white emeritus professor of economics at California State University, East Bay (CSUEB) — where I taught for twenty-five years before fully retiring in 2015 — “is teaching racist theories on intelligence. Students and faculty want him out.” A petition…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Readers of this blog may recall that shortly after the vice-presidential debate history professor Lora Burnett was hounded by trolls for Twitter comments that referred to Vice-President Pence as a “demon” and that her college administration buckled under the pressure to denounce her in a notorious October 12 statement. I blogged…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement was issued today (October 19) by the board of the University of California (UC) Berkeley Faculty Association. The University We Are For State support for public higher education in California has declined for decades: it constituted approximately one-third of the UC budget in 1990 and is about 10…
BY HANK REICHMAN Historian Lora Burnett has been completing a book on the culture wars and the conflict over “western civilization.” She never thought she would have to add a chapter to her book about her own experiences as a professor. Until yesterday. Burnett, who goes by L.D. Burnett on Twitter where she has over…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On September 29 I had the honor and privilege of participating, along with fellow AAUP Committee A member Joan Wallach Scott, in a webinar on academic freedom and student activism sponsored by the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania. The discussion was moderated by…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) was published on September 27. We all recognize that this is an extraordinarily difficult time for everyone in higher education. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to increased costs, yet state support is being cut back and enrollments…
BY HANK REICHMAN If you weren’t familiar with Zoom before the COVID-19 pandemic, you must be now. Everyone is using it — for faculty and staff meetings, seminar talks and panels, political and union organizing, socializing with friends and family, holding remote weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, and, of course, teaching online classes. And, yes, we’re…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week John Wilson posted on this blog a piece about how “an event at San Francisco State University was banned by leading tech giants after a campaign to censor it.” If you have not read John’s post, please do so now; this is an incredibly important issue. As John…
BY HANK REICHMAN The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has apparently restored its diversity, equity and inclusion program after lab Director Mike Witherell told employees that the program would be suspended on orders from the White House, which called such initiatives “un-American propaganda training sessions.” In a second memo, issued over the weekend, Witherell said a…