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…
BY HANK REICHMAN “A university without student protests against visiting speakers would be like a forest without birds.” — Timothy Garton Ash, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, p. 155 This is the first of three four posts in a series. The issue of the right of controversial and sometimes deeply offensive invited…
BY HANK REICHMAN The California State University (CSU) system has hired new managers at more than double the rate of other employees over the past decade at salaries growing twice as fast as those of faculty members and support staff. The administration of the University of California (UC) system pays salaries and benefits to top managers…
BY HANK REICHMAN In 2012 voters in Alameda County (including this blogger), across the bay from San Francisco, approved Measure B, a parcel tax, to provide the Peralta Community College District, which has campuses in Berkeley, Alameda and Oakland, an extra $8 million each year. The funds were designated to “support affordable college education including:…
BY HANK REICHMAN A little more than a month ago, Martin Kich posted to this blog a piece on the Koch network that prompted a lively and extensive exchange in the comments section between Conor Gibson of UnKoch My Campus, John Wilson, and Phil Magness, a professor at George Mason University, frequent commenter on this…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted an item on threats to academic freedom at Central European University (CEU) in Hungary and European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP). Yesterday, tens of thousands of demonstrators swarmed Budapest in defense of the CEU. The protest drew some of the largest crowds against right-wing prime minister Victor Orban’s…