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…
BY HANK REICHMAN Responding to the Trump administration’s decision to replace the National Commission on Forensic Science with an in-house law enforcement task force and a yet-unnamed adviser, four prominent associations of scientists, led by the 120,000-member American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), on June 9 called on the Justice Department to reverse…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a February 2016 post, “Academic Freedom Threatened in Poland,” I reported on how academics in Poland were coming to the defense of Polish-American scholar Jan T. Gross, Professor of History at Princeton University and one of the world’s leading Holocaust historians, after reports that Poland intended to withdraw a national honor…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the wake of a series of incidents in which provocative and often offensive individuals, mostly from the right side of the political spectrum, have been prevented from speaking at college and university campuses, a number of state legislators have proposed — and a few have passed — legislation that would ostensibly…