POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN In November, PEN America, the organization of writers that champions free expression and is the largest of the more than 100 centers worldwide that make up the PEN International network, released a report warning that “a wave of alarming legislative efforts to limit teaching and learning on topics including racism, sexism,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorating the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Perhaps fittingly for our time, it is marked by the revelation that on January 10, by a 10-0 vote, the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board removed from the middle school curriculum Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, which tells the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Given the case’s high importance, a U.S. District Court judge says he hopes to issue an order by January 24 on a suit filed by a group of University of Florida professors to invalidate the school’s conflict of interest policy as an unconstitutional infringement on freedom of speech. “This is on the…
BY HANK REICHMAN The indispensable Chris Newfield has a new post up at his blog Remaking the University, “Newsom’s *Big Funding* Budget for UC and CSU is Flat.” In it he picks apart the false promises in California governor Gavin Newsom’s initial budget proposal for higher education, although the focus is mostly on the University…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a recent zoom meeting I had occasion to meet Monica Casper, dean of the College of Arts and Letters at San Diego State University. Dean Casper mentioned that she had recently been the target of online harassment and controversy for some tweets she had posted. Curious, I looked into the case…
BY HANK REICHMAN Ohio State University professor emeritus Harvey Graff, who occasionally posts to this blog, has a smart and entertaining piece today in the Washington Monthly on “The Banality of University Slogans.” You know, the kind of mindless “branding” pablum like, “Here, everything is possible!” It brought to mind the time when my university,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Late last night the largest ongoing strike in the US came to an end as, after ten weeks out, student workers at Columbia University, represented by Student Workers of Columbia, an affiliate of the United Auto Workers, reached a tentative agreement with university management. All details are not yet public, but it…
BY HANK REICHMAN On December 10, I had the pleasure of participating in a fantastic and timely program in the University of California (UC) National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement’s 2021 “Speech Spotlight Live” series. “Is Academic Freedom Under Siege?” featured Sigal Ben-Porath, Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and author of…
BY HANK REICHMAN “The University of California could not function without the labor of lecturers. In a given year, UC employs more than 6,000 of these educators, who are hired on short-term contracts and lack the stability of tenure. All told, they teach roughly a third of courses offered across the system. Since 2011, the…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Michael Hobbes, a journalist based in Berlin, has a substack site, “Confirm My Choices,” where he regularly posts commentary on a variety of topics. Today he posted a piece, “Lies, Damn Lies and ‘Self-Censorship’ Statistics,” that really hit the nail on the head about the much-ballyhooed “Campus Free Speech Crisis.” I’m…