POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a petition to the Higher Learning Commission signed by elected officials and community leaders from across Indiana and the Midwest, joined by thousands of faculty members and students at colleges and universities across Indiana and the Midwest. The petition calls on the Commission to reject…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a small victory for the sanctuary movement, recruiters from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) won’t have a booth at the Rutgers University-Newark Government and Public Service Fair. Students from RU Dreamers, a group for undocumented immigrants and their allies, organized an online “ICE is not welcome here” petition calling on…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following resolution was adopted unanimously on February 15 by the Faculty Senate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. WHEREAS UW System President Ray Cross has publicly declared his support for shared governance, promising at one point on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus to resign his position if he failed to protect…
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 for streaming. The film was shown to enthusiastic audiences at the AAUP’s 2015 and 2016 Summer Institutes. …
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN For the past few years Wisconsin has been ground zero in the fight over the future of public higher education. The AAUP, along with the Wisconsin AFT, has condemned a series of actions taken by Governor Scott Walker, the Wisconsin state legislature, and the University of Wisconsin system board of regents in…
BY HANK REICHMAN Later this month the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case of Janus v. AFSCME, Council 31, in which anti-union “right to work” forces are challenging the right of public employee unions to collect agency fees from non-members that the unions represent. These fees have since 1977 been protected by…
BY HANK REICHMAN Fifty years ago this April the administration of Columbia University deployed the New York City Police Department to clear hundreds of student protesters from five campus buildings they had occupied for nearly a week, during which the police ran riot, indiscriminately beating students and faculty members, protesting or not, while “clearing” the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last June I posted a piece to this blog praising conservative scholar Jonathan Marks for his forthright defense of the academic freedom of Black Lives Matter activist Lisa Durden, who was dismissed from her part-time teaching position at Essex County College in New Jersey after she argued with the odious Tucker Carlson…
BY HANK REICHMAN On Friday, January 19, the AAUP and the National Education Association (NEA) jointly filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Janus v. AFSCME, Council 31. In that case the ostensible plaintiff, Mark Janus, backed by the National Right to Work Committee and other anti-union groups, seeks…
BY HANK REICHMAN Issued in December, the AAUP’s report, “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom,” examines politically motivated threats to scientific research, with emphasis on threats to climate science and on the initial actions of the Trump administration. As one of the authors of this report I learned how daunting, if not…