Remembering Tom Hayden

BY HANK REICHMAN I first met Tom Hayden, who died eight days ago at age 76, when we both participated in the occupation of Mathematics Hall during the Columbia University student rebellion of 1968.  Tom was, of course, no longer a student and had no institutional affiliation with Columbia, but he joined the protesters both…

Adjuncts Are Scholars Too

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Kevin Birmingham has a Ph.D. in English from Harvard, where he is presently an instructor in the university’s writing program.  His book, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses won both the 2015 PEN New England Award for Nonfiction and the 2015 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. …

Victory at Harvard!

BY HANK REICHMAN Early yesterday morning Harvard University and its striking food service workers reached a tentative agreement, which, if approved by union members in a vote scheduled for today, will bring to an end a 22-day strike that garnered national attention.  (For previous posts on this blog about the strike go here, here, here,…

AAUP Supports APSCUF in Struggle for Quality Education, Fair Contract

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement was issued by Rudy Fichtenbaum, President of the American Association of University Professors, and Howard Bunsis, chair of the AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress: “The AAUP and the AAUP-CBC stand in solidarity with our colleagues in Association of Pennsylvania State Colleges and University Faculties (APSCUF) in their struggle for…

Diverse Faculty? Maybe "We Don't Want Them"

BY HANK REICHMAN “Why aren’t college faculties more racially diverse?”  That’s the important question addressed in a recent column published in the Hechinger report and the Washington Post by Marybeth Gasman, professor of higher education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Penn Center for Minority Serving…

Why We Protest and the Meaning of AAUP Censure

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN In June the AAUP’s annual membership meeting voted unanimously to place the College of St. Rose in Albany, New York, on the association’s list of administrations censured for violations of academic freedom.  The censure concerns the action taken on December 11, 2015, by the administration of the college to eliminate twenty-seven…

Harvard Faculty Members Support Strikers

BY HANK REICHMAN In an update to my previous post on the continuing strike of food service workers at Harvard University, I called attention to a walkout by hundreds of Harvard students on Monday in support of the strikers.  As the students and workers rallied, Kennedy School of Government lecturer Timothy P. McCarthy, a Harvard…

Support APSCUF Strike!

BY HANK REICHMAN Faculty members at Pennsylvania’s 14 state-owned universities went on strike today after bargaining to prevent the first classroom walkout in the system’s 34 years collapsed. The Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties (APSCUF) announced shortly after 5 a.m. that a strike could not be averted after five consecutive days of…

Reich: "Public Higher Education is Dying in the U.S."

BY HANK REICHMAN Public higher education is “dying” in the US, with the pricing out of students from poorer backgrounds amounting to a “national tragedy in the making.”  So warned Robert Reich, chancellor’s professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and secretary of labor in the Bill Clinton administration, in a…