BY HANK REICHMAN On November 18, the American Association of University Professors joined the American Federation of Teachers, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and more than 100 other organizations in a letter calling on president-elect Donald Trump to denounce acts of hate on college campuses and elsewhere. That morning I spoke at a press conference…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD (WITH INTRODUCTION BY HENRY REICHMAN) Since it first appeared in the New York Times a week ago, I’ve been meaning to write something in response to Princeton professor Mark Lilla’s op-ed, “The End of Identity Liberalism.” But I’ve been traveling and had to put off the task, hoping along the way to write something…
POSTED BY HENRY REICHMAN The following statement, signed by over 150 historians of Judaism, was published yesterday by the Jewish Journal. As scholars of Jewish history, we are acutely attuned to the fragility of democracies and the consequences for minorities when democracies fail to live up to their highest principles. The United States has a…
BY HANK REICHMAN For some time now the AAUP and many others have decried the growing privatization of our public colleges and universities and the corporatization of management styles at both public and private institutions. The horrendous costs of these trends have become ever more apparent in the skyrocketing tuition bills and ballooning debt burden…
BY HANK REICHMAN The continuing assault on academic freedom in Turkey, which began last spring and intensified after the failed July coup attempt, continues. (For previous coverage on this blog go here.) According to Scholars at Risk, “On October 29, 2016, Turkish authorities issued a decree ordering the dismissal of 1,267 academic personnel, and the…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD The following piece is reposted with permission from Remaking the University, a blog sponsored by Michael Meranze, professor of history at UCLA, and Christopher Newfield, professor of English at UC Santa Barbara. It’s tempting to see higher education as a sideshow in the upheaval that Donald J. Trump’s election presents for every…
BY HANK REICHMAN For some time now colleges and universities across the country have been roiled by debates over so-called “safe spaces.” On one side stand those who argue that many members of the higher education community, especially various minorities, need “safe spaces” free from potentially harassing behavior and verbal abuse. Sometimes they have gone…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following op-ed piece appeared on November 9 in the Daily Bruin, the campus newspaper at UCLA. It was reposted as well by the UCLA Faculty Association under the above title. For those unaware, according to Wikipedia “a flexitarian diet is one that is plant-based with the occasional inclusion of meat…
BY HANK REICHMAN In 1998 the late philosopher Richard Rorty published Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. While I was familiar with Rorty’s interesting brand of neo-pragmatism, with its debt to AAUP founding father John Dewey, I must have missed this book and have no recollection of its overall arguments or its reception. …