POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a letter sent yesterday to the Trustees, President, and Provost of Mills College by the chair of the University of California at Berkeley Department of Philosophy. A philosopher was among the five faculty members laid off last month by Mills trustees as part of a…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The plenary panel at the 44th Annual Conference on Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, held March 27 at CUNY Graduate Center in New York, was devoted to “The Impact of Anti-Intellectualism on the State of Higher Education.” The panelists were Susan Jacoby, the best-selling author of The Age…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement was sent via email on Monday, July 10 by the University of California at Berkeley Faculty Association (BFA): To: Elizabeth Hillman, President, Mills College Board of Trustees, Mills College CC: Roger Sparks, Chair, Faculty Executive Committee Chinyere Oparah, Provost and Dean of the Faculty The Berkeley Faculty…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On June 14 the AAUP and the Newseum co-hosted a symposium on current challenges to free expression on college campuses, the First Amendment’s role and the future of the student press at American universities. The program consisted of two panels, one on free speech and the second on the student press. …
BY HANK REICHMAN Although Americans overall believe by a 55-36 percent margin that colleges and universities have a positive rather than a negative effect on “the way things are going in this country,” self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58%) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45%…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I reported on the layoff of five tenured professors at Mills College in Oakland, California. Although Mills’ action has failed to receive coverage in either the higher education press or the local media, as of this writing my post has been viewed more than 36,000 times. Yet Mills may not…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN This week the AAUP’s Committee on Graduate and Professional Students issued a statement condemning the current campaign by private elite universities “to obstruct the democratic rights and freedoms of their graduate employees” who seek union recognition. The University of Chicago is one such institution. There the administration continues to obstruct the…
BY HANK REICHMAN On June 26, the board of trustees of Mills College, meeting behind closed doors, approved a vaguely formulated “Financial Stabilization Plan” (FSP) previously rejected overwhelmingly by the institution’s faculty. The plan calls for reducing the number of departments from 18 to 13 and the number of schools from four to three. Two…
BY HANK REICHMAN Right-wing media organizations and some conservative faculty members often have been quick to condemn student protesters and allegedly “leftist” faculty members for their efforts to disrupt or silence conservative speakers as well as for their sometimes silly demands for so-called “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.” Much of this criticism is well-merited; even…
BY HANK REICHMAN A fifth of the Los Angeles Community College District’s 230,000 students are homeless, and nearly two-thirds can’t afford to eat properly, according to a new survey commissioned by the system’s board of trustees and reported yesterday in the Los Angeles Times: Nearly half the L.A. community college students surveyed reported struggling with…