CFA, CSU Reach Tentative Agreement on Two-Year Contract Extension

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following announcement was released today by the California Faculty Association (CFA, an affiliate of the AAUP.  CFA represents more than 28,000 tenured and tenure-track professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors and coaches on the 23 campuses of the California State University system. The California Faculty Association’s Bargaining Team and Board of Directors…

Government Decrees Dismiss 5,717 Turkish Academics

BY HANK REICHMAN According to a report on the website turkeypurge.com, 5,717 teachers at 117 universities have been dismissed from their jobs in Turkey due to government decrees issued under a state of emergency following the failed coup of July 2016.  A total of nine government decrees issued between September 2016 and August 2017 dismissed…

We Are Educators, Not Prosecutors

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following op-ed was published today in the Harvard Crimson over the bylines of Jason Beckfield, Joyce E. Chaplin, and Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and signed by 159 members of the Harvard University faculty.  We, the undersigned faculty, write to protest the University’s decisions to overturn Michelle Jones’s admission to the Ph.D.…

“Explaining” Why Women Aren’t Physicists

BY HANK REICHMAN Why are women and girls still so underrepresented in the study and teaching of STEM disciplines?  The question has received a good deal of attention recently, as it should, and one common conclusion is that sexist attitudes and practices, including blatant sexual harassment and discrimination, remain far too common and are often…

Is Milo’s Bubble Bursting?

BY HANK REICHMAN It seems the much-ballyhooed and monstrously misnamed “Free Speech Week,” organized by the infamous bigot-provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and scheduled to unfold September 24-27 at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), may not take place after all.  And if it does, it will be in a scaled-down version. The event was to…

Another Speaker Disinvited; This Time It’s a Priest

BY HANK REICHMAN In all the hubbub over the free speech rights of outside speakers on campus, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that efforts by students and administrations at colleges and universities to bar those they deem controversial are hardly limited to right-wing provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter, or Richard Spencer. …

St. Petersburg’s European University Faces Closure

BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this year I posted an item about political threats to the existence of Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and European University in St. Petersburg, Russia.  The threats to both institutions continue, but it now appears that European University may be at the end of its rope, having lost both its…