POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On Monday night, June 1, through the following morning the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) crowded protesters arrested in downtown Los Angeles and Westwood into sheriff’s buses and brought them to Jackie Robinson Stadium. Located off-campus, on the grounds of the Los Angeles Veterans Health Administration and seating just 1,820, it…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I recorded a podcast with the New American Baccalaureate Project (NAB) in which we discussed academic freedom, both generally and in the context of the extraordinary developments of the past month. It has now been posted to NAB’s website. Here’s how they describe it: As protests spread across the US…
BY HANK REICHMAN No right-thinking person can fail to condemn the looting, arson, and window-smashing that have marred the overwhelmingly peaceful protests that have swept the nation for the past week in the wake of the brutal slaying of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. These criminal actions may have been carried out by a…
BY HANK REICHMAN On Thursday, May 28, a website called Israel-Academia-Monitor published an “editorial note” entitled “AAUP Losing Credibility over the Palestinian-Israeli Dispute.” It begins: The prestigious academic organization, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), is losing credibility. Founded in 1915, the AAUP has helped to shape the standards and procedures of higher…
BY HANK REICHMAN Two articles from today’s (London) Times Higher Education discuss how higher education systems in the U.S., the U.K., and Australia, which have embraced privatization and corporatization, and systems in continental Europe, which have largely retained the public funding model, are faring in the face of the challenges posed by the fiscal implications…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Science magazine reports the following: Seventy-seven U.S. scientists who have won a Nobel Prize [on May 21] asked Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services, to “act urgently” to review a controversial NIH decision to terminate a grant that supported…
BY HANK REICHMAN No sooner had I posted my COVID-19 and Higher Education annotated reading list, than two pieces appeared that also deserve attention. The first is by Sara Goldrick-Rab, Professor of sociology and medicine at Temple University. Her book, Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, is…
BY HANK REICHMAN As the academic year comes to a close all eyes are now turned toward the Fall. Will campuses be able to open up again? Will all teaching remain remote or will it become hybrid? And, heck, what about college football? But there are even larger long-term questions. The economic crisis engendered by…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following letter from staff, faculty, and student groups, delivered to University of California President Janet Napolitano, the UC Board of Regents, the campus Chancellors, and the Medical Center CEOs, enumerates concerns and suggestions for dealing with the financial consequences of COVID-19. May 13, 2020 Dear University of California President Napolitano…
BY HANK REICHMAN In two remarkable statements issued recently scholars from more than thirty countries, including Germany, Israel and the U.S., have spoken out against efforts by the German government to restrict the academic freedom and free speech rights of artists and scholars suspected of supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian…