BY HANK REICHMAN When I began work earlier this year on guest-editing the new issue of Academe devoted to “academic freedom around the world,” I was motivated by the recognition that, as I put it in the editor’s note, “Scholarship today is global” and “threats to scholarship outside the United States inevitably affect scholarship here.” …
BY HANK REICHMAN So now it’s come to burning books! The following account comes from The George-Anne, an independent student newspaper at Georgia Southern University, in Statesboro, Georgia: Students at Georgia Southern University burned a book, written by a New York Times contributor, after a Q&A session at her lecture became heated. Jennine Capó Crucet…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The AAUP has filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in support of Jennifer Freyd, who sued the University of Oregon (UO) for gender discrimination based on significant pay disparities with male faculty members. A district court had dismissed her suit based, in part,…
BY HANK REICHMAN October 1 was the legislatively mandated opening day for California’s new ridiculously named fully online community college, Calbright. But there were no classes. There were no instructors. There were no students. There were, however, some applicants. According to Taylor Huckaby, Calbright’s communications director, about 655 people had started an application, of which…
BY HANK REICHMAN Despite the presence of the verb “ban” in my headline, this post does not uncover yet another censorious outrage committed by a university administration — well, at least not a very major one. Still, a recent decision by the administration of Columbia University to prohibit its university marching band from performing at…
BY HANK REICHMAN In 2011 Yale University announced the establishment of a joint venture with the National University of Singapore, Yale-NUS, a four-year, fully residential undergraduate institution. The venture differs from overseas programs like NYU’s controversial Abu Dhabi campus (see here, here, and here) because it is ostensibly independent of Yale, offering its own degrees. …
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Recent years have seen extensive cuts in foreign language education at US colleges and universities. Between 2013 and 2016 alone some 651 foreign language programs were eliminated. Often these cuts are part of broader assaults on the humanities and liberal education more generally. In 2018 the AAUP and the Association of…
BY HANK REICHMAN Leon Wofsy, Emeritus Professor of Immunology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, died August 25 at the age of 97. Although I have been a graduate student and instructor at Berkeley and lived most of my adult life within a mile or two…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement, “Don’t Teach, Strike! A Call to Educators Worldwide to Take Action for Climate Justice on September 20th,” was issued by nine U.S. faculty members, including AAUP Committee A member Michael Mann, and has since been endorsed by many more. To add your name to this call go to…
BY HANK REICHMAN In The Future of Academic Freedom I devote a chapter to the baleful influence on academic freedom of colleges’ and universities’ increasing reliance on external donors, many of whom act on political motivations potentially detrimental to institutional values. Some of the possible pitfalls may be seen in how the Massachusetts Institute of…