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…
BY HANK REICHMAN In January a wide variety of academic and labor organizations, including the California conference of the AAUP and the California Faculty Association (CFA), released a report, “The $48 fix: Reclaiming California’s Master Plan for Higher Education,” which demonstrated that tuition could be eliminated at the University of California (UC) and the California…
BY HANK REICHMAN It has become something of a truism that the Trump administration and the Republican Party more generally have been dismissive of and even hostile to the findings and methods of scientific research. The Union of Concerned Scientists this summer released an exhaustive report, Sidelining Science Since Day One, that documents how in…
BY HANK REICHMAN I thought I might write something in response to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ speech this week at Georgetown University, but then I read Dahlia Lithwick’s take, “The Eggshell Attorney General,” and figured I had little to add. Here are her first three paragraphs, but the entire piece is worth reading: Almost every…
BY HANK REICHMAN Fresh from the embarrassment of rescinding a fellowship to whistleblower Chelsea Manning while welcoming disgraced Trumpers Corey Lewandowski and Sean Spicer, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has again privileged spokespersons for the right while denying their opponents a voice. Thursday and Friday the school will host a conference on “The Future of…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of an op-ed piece authored by the Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association (BFA) and published September 26 in the Daily Californian, the independent campus newspaper at the University of California at Berkeley, in response to recent events involving Milo Yiannopoulos’s failed “Free Speech Week.” The…