BY HANK REICHMAN On December 1, Central European University (CEU) announced that, after a lengthy struggle, it would abandon its Budapest campus and relocate to Vienna. “Basically this is a dark day for freedom in Hungary,” said Michael Ignatieff, the president and rector of CEU. “And it’s a dark day for academic freedom.” CEU said…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week The Atlantic magazine announced a year-long reporting project, “The Speech Wars,” exploring questions of American free expression and public discourse. It is funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Fetzer Institute. According to the magazine, “The project will unfold across TheAtlantic.com,…
BY HANK REICHMAN If you’re an academic on Twitter, especially an historian, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered and perhaps even followed Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse. As the Pacific Standard put it introducing an interview with him, “Over the last few years, Kruse and other experts have been bringing evidence and expertise to well-curated…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the fall of 2016 the AAUP, the College Media Association, the Student Press Law Center, and the National Coalition Against Censorship issued a report, Threats to the Independence of Student Media. The report declared, “Candid journalism that discusses students’ dissatisfaction with the perceived shortcomings of their institutions can be uncomfortable for…
BY HANK REICHMAN The question in my title is central to a report released this week by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT). Report on the Implications for Academic Freedom in the Case of Andrew Potter at McGill University, prepared by professor Mark Gabbert of the University of Manitoba, has important implications for U.S.…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this year administrators at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, in Wausau, proposed dropping thirteen majors in the humanities and social sciences–including English, philosophy, history, sociology, and Spanish–while adding or expanding sixteen programs “with high-demand career paths.” The proposal would ostensibly address a $4.5 million deficit over two years. The added or…
BY HANK REICHMAN Matthew Hedges On Wednesday, during a court session lasting all of five minutes, British scholar Matthew Hedges was sentenced to life in prison for espionage by the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Hedges, a 31-year-old student at Durham University, was arrested May 5 at Dubai airport as he was departing after a two-week…
BY HANK REICHMAN As a retired faculty member I don’t attend too many scholarly conferences these days, outside of the AAUP of course. But I do still enjoy the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and plan to attend this year’s gathering in Boston, December 6-9. But like…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a recent “Data Snapshot” the AAUP’s Research Department took a look at the data around tenure and the casualization of faculty labor, finding that “the percentage of instructional positions that is off the tenure track amounted to 73 percent in 2016, the latest year for which data are available.” At Ph.D-granting…
BY HANK REICHMAN This afternoon I had the pleasure of joining a demonstration of University of California librarians and their supporters outside the Berkeley campus’s Doe Library where the latest bargaining session between the UC-AFT Librarians and the UC administration was taking place. As I previously reported, academic freedom is a central topic of negotiation. …