BY HANK REICHMAN For seventeen years Georgette Fleischer taught first-year English, now first-year Writing, at Barnard College in New York. For most of those years she found Barnard a “wonderful place to work. We felt like our work was appreciated, and that meant a great deal,” she told a reporter in September. That changed, however,…
BY HANK REICHMAN The National Park Service has pulled funding for a Black Panther Party legacy project to be undertaken at the University of California at Berkeley in response to criticism by conservative organizations, according to reports in the San Francisco Chronicle and the East Bay Times. In September, the Park Service announced that it…
BY HANK REICHMAN When the New York Times first announced in April that it was adding former Wall Street Journal conservative writer Bret Stephens to its stable of op-ed columnists — which already included the unctuous moralism of Ross Douthat and the simplistic pseudo-sociology of David Brooks — alarm bells went off. David Roberts on…
BY HANK REICHMAN What is the appropriate response when racists and neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer appear on campus? One approach is, well, simply ignore them, or at the least don’t take them too seriously. Bob Moser in the New Republic praises one questioner at Spencer’s Florida appearance last week for using mockery quite effectively, demanding…
BY HANK REICHMAN Florida Governor Rick Scott declared a state of emergency; the University of Florida spent a half-million dollars on security; protesters were peaceful, if boisterous; and neo-Nazi nincompoop Richard Spencer managed to speak on the Gainesville campus for nearly two hours and even answered questions from the audience. (At one point CUNY Professor…
BY HANK REICHMAN I have occasionally on this blog posted items about the conflicted views of American conservatives about academic freedom, at times calling attention to the ideas of principled academic conservatives whose approach and arguments often run counter to the unfortunate hostility to higher education now rapidly gaining credibility on the right, and with…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Joan W. Scott, Professor Emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study and former chair and current member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and Christopher Newfield, Professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara, member of the Academe magazine advisory board, and author of The…
BY HANK REICHMAN Not long after I posted an item on the shouting down of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra by pro-Trump protesters at Whittier College, I stumbled across one of the more sanctimonious and misguided pieces I’ve yet encountered about the current free speech battles on college and university campuses. In “Left-Wing Drexel Professor…
BY HANK REICHMAN It had to happen. In the latest instance of a campus speaker being shouted down and, in effect, prevented from speaking by protesters, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over DACA, was confronted, not by “antifa” liberal “snowflakes,” but by pro-Trump hecklers, who, according…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On August 8, the National Labor Relations Board ordered the University of Chicago to schedule a representation vote of its graduate student employees on whether they wish to be represented by the Graduate Students United, a joint affiliate of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the American Federation of…