BY HANK REICHMAN In the waning months of his term as California governor Jerry Brown embraced a new pet project: a totally online community college. With the enthusiastic support of California Community College Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley, Brown got the Legislature to somewhat reluctantly agree to spend an initial $100 million to get the online…
BY HANK REICHMAN In April I posted to this blog an item, “‘Professor Watchlist’ Goes International,” which reported, among other things, that a member of parliament from right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s party had called on students to send her videos of instructors “indoctrinating” them into leftist ideologies and that Bolsonaro himself shared one such…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Today, August 7, marks the third anniversary of the detention in Iran of Princeton University graduate student Xiyue Wang. Wang, a Chinese-born naturalized U.S.citizen who previously worked as a translator in Central Asia, was conducting doctoral research on Iran’s Qajar dynasty that ruled from 1785 to 1925 when he was arrested…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday Princeton political scientist and legal scholar Keith Whittington posted to this blog a piece entitled “Academic Freedom, Even for Amy Wax.” Wax is a University of Pennsylvania law professor whose extramural expression, most recently at the pro-Trump National Conservatism Conference, has been widely condemned as intolerant and racist. More than 1,000…
BY HANK REICHMAN In April I was privileged to appear on a program on academic freedom at New York University with Matthew Hedges and his wife, Daniela Tejada, sponsored by NYU’s AAUP chapter. Hedges is a British scholar who was held in solitary confinement in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for almost six months after…
BY HANK REICHMAN On July 11 I had the privilege of being a guest on Bryan Alexander’s “Future Trends Forum,” an online discussion venue focused in part on higher education issues. If you aren’t familiar with the forum or Bryan’s excellent work, you should check it out here. My session, which lasts about an hour,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Shortly after my most recent contribution to this blog, “On Commencement Speakers,” was posted, John Wilson offered the following comment in response: I’ve never participated in a commencement and only attended one in my life, because I find them boring and silly. The commencement address is the only potential exception to this…
BY HANK REICHMAN Commencement season has come to a close for another year, so perhaps it is a good time to reflect on the sometimes thorny issue of the extent to which challenges to commencement speakers, especially those invited to receive an honorary degree, represent a threat to free speech or academic freedom. As Princeton…
BY JOAN W. SCOTT At the 2019 AAUP annual conference Joan W. Scott, professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and longtime member and former chair of AAUP’s Committee A, delivered a luncheon address on the theme of “Knowledge for the Common Good.” The full text of that…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the report of the AAUP’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, presented to the AAUP annual meeting in Arlington, Virginia, on June 15 and to be published in the annual AAUP Bulletin issue of Academe later this summer. Introduction In the past year Committee A reviewed important cases and…