BY HANK REICHMAN The other day I had occasion to speak with a leader of the AAUP chapter at Columbia University, my alma mater. I mentioned to him how useful and impressive I have found the coverage of university events in the student-run campus daily newspaper, the Spectator. He agreed that the students have done an…
BY HANK REICHMAN The image above is from an AI video that the GREAT (and demented) LEADER himself posted to social media. It reminded me of an historical analogy I’ve been mulling over since I first saw videos of masked ICE thugs rampaging through neighborhoods, courthouses, and downtown squares, chasing down immigrants (documented or not)…
BY HANK REICHMAN Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die. As so many have pointed out, political violence—whatever the source—must be condemned for both its immorality and its destructiveness. Much as I have abhorred Kirk and the movement he represented, we are all worse off today than we were before he stepped to a podium…
BY HANK REICHMAN If there’s a better examplar of the higher education administrative establishment’s failures than E. Gordon Gee, I can’t think of one. Gee, who has held more university presidencies than any other American, has cut an extraordinary path of scandal and negligence pretty much everywhere he’s been. Yet he continues not only to…
BY HANK REICHMAN I’m old enough to remember when the venerable business magazine Forbes used to identify itself as a “capitalist tool.” The publication, now run by former flat-tax presidential candidate Steve Forbes, is unsurprisingly conservative and Republican in its editorial policies. Forbes endorsed Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2024. And while Forbes the magazine has…
BY HANK REICHMAN Dr. Jonathan Caravello, a lecturer in mathematics and philosophy at California State University, Channel Islands, was beaten and arrested on Thursday, July 10, in an ICE raid on a legal cannabis farm in Camarillo, California, that also resulted in the death of a worker who fell from a roof while fleeing immigration…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On July 7, the executive committee of the University of Pennsylvania AAUP chapter issued a statement in solidarity with Research Associates and Postdocs United at Penn (RAPUP) which is seeking union recognition in an NLRB election scheduled for July 16-17. In addition, the committee released an open letter to the Penn…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the winter 2025 issue of Academe, which I guest-edited, exiled Russian scholars Ilya Matveev and Evgeny Roshchin surveyed the state of academic freedom in that country in the aftermath of the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. (The issue also includes essays by Ukrainian scholars.) Unsurprisingly, they reported that Security agencies and…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Jay Bhattacharya, appointed by President Trump to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH), first gained national notoriety as a principal author of the so-called Great Barrington Declaration of 2020, which condemned the NIH for ignoring calls to mostly cease pandemic-related precautions. Now over 300 NIH staff have published the Bethesda…
BY HANK REICHMAN On May 25, the Black Flag Action Group, formed by scholars at Israeli colleges and universities, issued an important Urgent Call to Action demanding the heads of Israeli academic institutions “speak out” and “act immediately” to stop the war on Gaza. By May 31 the Call had collected over 1,400 signatures. As…