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…
BY HANK REICHMAN Two days ago I posted a piece on this blog about graduate student debt in which I cited an article in the New York Times that reported, among other things, that students in an online social work program at the University of Southern California (USC) averaged an extraordinary $109,486 in student loan…
BY HANK REICHMAN On May 21, the Department of Education released new data about levels of student debt in various academic programs. Writing in the New York Times, Kevin Carey, who directs the education policy program at New America, suggests that the move is part of the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda. The department is already…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a talk delivered at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) on May 20, 2019. My thanks to the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment for hosting the talk as part of its colloquia series and to the UCLA Faculty Association and Professors…
BY HANK REICHMAN In Fall 2017 the California Faculty Association (CFA), an AAUP-affiliated union representing nearly 28,000 California State University (CSU) faculty, librarians, counselors, and coaches, and CSU management agreed to extend their collective bargaining agreement. As part of that agreement, the sides agreed to continue negotiations over academic freedom and intellectual property with the…
BY HANK REICHMAN The late UC Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr once famously quipped that “the three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty.” Only the last of these, he suggested, presented a problem. Another related saying attributed to him was his description…
BY HANK REICHMAN At their spring meeting May 10, the 22 members of the Board of Governors of the Faculty Association of the California Community Colleges (FACCC) took a unanimous vote of no confidence in the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. It was only the second such vote in the organization’s 66-year history, the last…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week I discussed The Future of Academic Freedom with Patricia Raskin, host of the Internet radio show “Positive Living” on voiceamerica.com. To listen to this interesting conversation go to https://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/114836/fiona-citkin-how-they-made-it-henry-reichman-academic-freedom/57810 You can also listen to the discussion as a podcast on iTunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/henry-reichman-academic-freedom/id421428770?i=1000437359914