BY HANK REICHMAN On May 21, Professor Vida Samiian, Director of the Middle East Studies program at California State University, Fresno, and a former dean of humanities at the school, wrote an open letter announcing that she would not complete the remainder of her appointment in the CSU’s Faculty Early Retirement Program in protest of…
BY HANK REICHMAN In an op-ed piece for the Washington Post a few days ago, Jeffrey Selingo, a former editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education, offers a number of suggestions for how colleges and universities might cut costs. Instead of “always looking at the revenue side of the ledger by figuring out how to attract…
BY HANK REICHMAN In an important article in the November-December 2016 issue of Academe, National Book Award winner Ibram Kendi — who will be keynoting the AAUP’s annual conference in Washington next month — explained “Why Standardized Tests Have Standardized Postracial Ideology.” “In all the major affirmative action cases,” Kendi argued, supporters and opponents usually…
BY HANK REICHMAN My twitter feed was humming this morning with reaction to an article published in Skeptic Magazine, by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay. They managed to submit a hoax article — “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” — to a journal they purported to be about gender studies and quickly celebrated this achievement…
BY HENRY REICHMAN On Thursday, May 18, California State University, Los Angeles student and immigration rights activist Claudia Rueda was taken into custody by Border Patrol agents as she moved her family’s car outside their home. Federal agents had detained Rueda’s mother earlier this month. The following statement on her detention was released today by the…
BY HANK REICHMAN On April 27, Queen Elizabeth II formally assented to the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, approved by Britain’s Conservative Parliament earlier in the year. The act accelerated the privatization of Britain’s higher education system, a process begun decades earlier and which in key respects mirrors American developments. The following comments on…
BY HANK REICHMAN A few weeks ago the California state auditor released damning reports on the management of both the California State University Chancellor’s Office and the University of California Office of the President (UCOP), with the latter stirring up a hornet’s nest of controversy in the legislature and the media. At a Board of…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following open letter to Yale University President Peter Salovey appeared yesterday in the Yale Daily News. Dear President Salovey: As members of the Yale Law faculty, we write to express our disagreement with your May 3, 2017 public letter regarding graduate student teaching fellow unionization. In the letter, you suggest that…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday I posted the first in a series of posts on the free speech rights of invited campus speakers. I fully expected to devote much of today to preparing the next installment. But this morning Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos delivered the commencement address at Bethune-Cookman University, an historically black institution in…
BY HANK REICHMAN AB 847, a bill currently under consideration in the California Assembly, would require the local academic senate of a campus of the California State University or of a campus of the California Community Colleges, and would request the local academic senate of a campus of the University of California, to post its…