BY HANK REICHMAN It’s a pretty safe assumption that a trans woman like Chelsea Manning, who served seven years in military prison for leaking classified documents revealing U.S. government involvement in torture, is not someone who can normally expect to be named a Visiting Fellow at Harvard. But on Wednesday the university’s John F. Kennedy…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a letter addressed to the UC Berkeley campus and the larger Berkeley community, 76 faculty members from various departments have called for a complete boycott of classes and campus activities during the so-called “Free Speech Week” to be held on campus September 24-27. The week is sponsored by the Berkeley Patriot,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Recently installed University of California at Berkeley (UCB) Chancellor Carol Christ has proclaimed this to be the campus’s “free speech year.” As part of that effort Christ has announced that the infamous bigot-provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, whose talk at Berkeley was canceled February 1 in the face of violent protests, would return to…
BY HANK REICHMAN “We can respect the right of free speech without having to respect the ideas being uttered.” — Joan W. Scott, “On Free Speech and Academic Freedom” (forthcoming) This is the final installment in a four-part series. Part I may be found here; part II is here; part III is here. Academic Freedom…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN In response to President Donald Trump’s decision to eliminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) president Rudy Fichtenbaum issued the following statement. The American Association of University Professors denounces in the strongest possible terms the decision by the Trump administration to end…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this summer I posted a piece praising conservative scholar Jonathan Marks for his forthright defense of the academic freedom of African-American activist Lisa Durden, dismissed from her part-time community college teaching position in response to comments she made on Fox News. Now Marks has weighed in on the controversy surrounding lecturer…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a statement issued August 28 by the Council of the American Historical Association. The AHA is also compiling an ongoing bibliography of the diverse perspectives of AHA members. The American Historical Association welcomes the emerging national debate about Confederate monuments. Much of this public statuary…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the following statement signed by fifteen professors from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton universities appeared on the website of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton: We are scholars and teachers at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale who have some thoughts to share and advice to offer students who…
BY HANK REICHMAN As classes begin at colleges and universities across the country the wave of targeted online harassment of faculty members in response to comments made as private citizens — and the often cowardly responses of their administrations — continues unabated. At Dartmouth College, lecturer Mark Bray, an emerging expert on anti-fascist movements, received…
BY HANK REICHMAN My title alludes to an identically titled 1904 pamphlet by Lenin, one of his more tedious, in which the one step forward was the Russian Social Democrats’ Second Congress held the year before and the two steps backward the emergence of the great factional split between Lenin’s Bolsheviks and the opposing Mensheviks. …