BY HANK REICHMAN Charlie Kirk is the twenty-something founder of the right-wing “student group” Turning Point USA, sponsor of the notorious Professor Watchlist. Kirk’s group is so nutso that even the Charles Koch Foundation and the Young America’s Foundation have turned against it. Sarah Ruger, director of Free Speech Initiatives for the Charles Koch Institute,…
BY HANK REICHMAN For some time now, despite the rash of school shootings and the growing number of accidental shootings associated with the unfettered dissemination of firearms, violent crime in most urban areas in the U.S. has been declining for decades. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, after peaking in 1991, “crime…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week Hungarian universities received 24 hours from the Ministry of Human Capacities and the Ministry of Justice to comment on a proposed amendment, which declares that gender studies courses may no longer be offered in Hungary, the Hungarian economic and political weekly Heti Világgazdaság (HVG.hu) reported yesterday. According to a report…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN At the AAUP’s annual conference in June Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University and author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, was the plenary luncheon speaker. Chapter 7 of her book was published separately…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Agents of Change, the documentary film about the late 1960s student rebellions at San Francisco State and Cornell Universities, which led to the establishment of Black Studies programs at both schools, is now available on DVD. The film was shown to enthusiastic audiences at the AAUP’s 2015 and 2016 Summer Institutes.…
BY HANK REICHMAN President Donald Trump has said many, many moronic things, but his tweet this weekend about the raging wildfires in California must be one of his dumbest. “California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amount of readily available water to be…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today’s Washington Post carries an article reporting that protesters upset by President Trump’s upcoming visit to the United Kingdom have launched a campaign to play Green Day’s “American Idiot” so many times that, by the time Trump arrives, the song will be the No. 1 single in the UK. According to the…
BY HANK REICHMAN If there was a silver lining to be found in the cloud of partisan obfuscation and skewed logic that was Chief Justice John Roberts’ ruling in Trump v. Hawaii, which upheld the president’s notorious Muslim ban, it was the decision’s formal repudiation of the Supreme Court’s infamous 1943 decision in Korematsu v.…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday, as expected, the U.S. Supreme Court in a narrow 5-4 ruling capped a week of outrageous decisions by declaring agency fee payments by non-union members unconstitutional in the public sector. The ruling, which overturned a unanimous 1977 decision supported by such conservative luminaries as William Rehnquist, Lewis Powell, and Warren Burger,…
BY HANK REICHMAN University of California President and former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has been a leader among university administrators in opposing the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants, most recently speaking forcefully to denounce the administration’s hideous policy of separating children from their parents at the border. Now UC faculty are calling on Napolitano…