POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier today I was privileged to participate in a stimulating discussion of free speech on campuses on the radio call-in show “Your Call” on KALW-FM in San Francisco. Participating in the call were moderator Renee Kemp; Samantha Harris, director of policy research at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE);…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Albert Einstein was a member of the AAUP from 1935 until his death in 1955. The following questions about academic freedom and political inquisitions were posed to Einstein in the 1950s, during the McCarthy era. They come from a document held in the Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center at…
BY HANK REICHMAN “The speech we must protect most forcefully is not the speech we hate the most, but the speech that is most endangered.” — CUNY Professor of History Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) on Twitter, April 25 “The countless fruitful discussions that happen all the time in college classrooms don’t grab headlines.” — UW Milwaukee…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a recent post to this blog, John K. Wilson took issue with the AAUP’s recommendation “that administrations and elected faculty bodies work jointly to establish institutional regulations that prohibit the surreptitious recording of classroom discourse or of private meetings between students and faculty members.” The recommendation came in the context of…
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…