BY HANK REICHMAN “If there’s an organized outrage machine, we need an organized response.” Those words from Tressie McMillan Cottom, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, author of the excellent Lower Ed, prolific blogger, and frequent (and often witty) presence on Twitter, headline a story in this morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education on…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a victory for academic freedom and faculty rights, a California State University, Fullerton part-time anthropology lecturer facing dismissal after a fracas at a campus demonstration in February has been reinstated by order of an arbitrator. The university’s College Republicans had accused Eric Canin of striking one of them at the demonstration.…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following was posted on the blog of the Western Michigan University AAUP chapter: We join our colleagues at AFT-Michigan, along with our AFT-affiliated colleagues here at WMU, the Professional Instructors Organization (PIO) and Teaching Assistants Union (TAU), in condemning in the strongest possible terms the death sentence of admitted WMU student Mujtaba’a…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On July 8 I was interviewed on “Resistance Round Table,” a weekly radio broadcast on WPKN in Bridgeport, Connecticut, by AAUP member Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. We discussed current issues in academic freedom and free expression on campus. To listen to the half-hour interview go to this link: http://archives.wpkn.org/bookmarks/listen/190984 A…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following letter in support of the University of North Carolina Law School’s Center for Civil Rights, which the university’s Board of Governors has threatened,was sent on Tuesday. To: The University of North Carolina, Board of Governors Date: July 11, 2017 We write to you in our capacity as law professors,…
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%…