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. …
BY HANK REICHMAN Most members of the AAUP, myself included, identify politically on the left side of the political spectrum, as do a majority of American faculty members, especially in the humanities and social sciences. But the AAUP’s mission is to “advance academic freedom and shared governance” for all faculty members, regardless of their political…
BY HANK REICHMAN Recently I had occasion to look a bit into the history of the University of California at Berkeley, where I earned my doctorate and in whose shadow I have lived most of my adult life. In doing so, I encountered an interesting document, “Shared Governance at the University of California: An Historical…
BY HANK REICHMAN Almost one in four lecturers at universities in the United Kingdom claims to have been subjected to bullying by colleagues over their academic views, a recently published survey suggests. Of 2,300 people who responded to a poll on academic freedom, 23 per cent said they had suffered workplace bullying on account of…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is reposted with permission from the website of the Colorado state conference of the AAUP. Despite that the symposium gods burdened Boulder with an inevitable spring blizzard, the AAUP Academic Freedom Symposium at CU-Boulder on April 29th was inspiring and memorable. The melodramatic weather could not discourage participants or…
BY HANK REICHMAN Blowhard-in-chief Donald Trump’s condemnation of “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides” in the wake of this weekend’s events in Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia (UVA), has been criticized so extensively and justifiably, even by members of his own party — many of whom themselves bear responsibility…