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…
BY HANK REICHMAN My title–at least the first part–comes from a Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical of the 1960s, now I suspect embarrassingly dated (although it’s been revived as recently as 2011), that I adored in high school. But this post comes in response to an op-ed piece published two days ago in the Dallas Morning…
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 16 and to be published in the annual AAUP Bulletin issue of Academe later this summer. Introduction In the past year Committee A published several policy documents…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today, May 22, two hundred tenured faculty members at the University of Southern California (USC) released an open letter to the school’s board of trustees calling for the resignation of university President C. L. Max Nikias, saying he had “lost the moral authority to lead” in the wake of revelations that a…
BY HANK REICHMAN Even as the European University at St. Petersburg, Russia, struggles to survive, another independent university in Budapest may pick up stakes and move in the face of continued hostility from the right-wing nationalist government of Viktor Orban. “We can’t go into another academic year like this. We’re in a holding pattern but…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last month I had the privilege and honor of addressing a colloquium of faculty and advanced graduate students at the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP), Russia, which offers advanced degrees in the humanities and social sciences. My topic was “The AAUP and the Struggle for Academic Rights in the U.S.” The…