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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
BY HANK REICHMAN In 2015, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed SB 11, also known as the “campus carry” law, at a shooting range. The law permits the concealed carry of guns in dorms, classrooms, and buildings at state universities and community colleges, while leaving individual schools some latitude to keep parts of their properties firearm-free, extending…
BY HANK REICHMAN Readers of this blog may be familiar with the regular National Public Radio (NPR) feature “Science Friday.” Last week one 35-minute segment, “Science in the Crosshairs,” focused on governmental and other threats to the academic freedom of scientists. It began with fetal tissue research: After furor erupted over a video seeming to…
BY HANK REICHMAN Seven in ten University of California workers in clerical, administrative and support services struggle to put adequate food on the table, according to a new study reported in today’s Los Angeles Times. The study, conducted by Occidental College, found that 45% of 2,890 employees surveyed throughout the 10-campus UC system went hungry…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Most Americans know California’s Napa Valley as a tourist destination and the source of many of the country’s finest wines. But people live there too, of course, and many of them go to school. Specifically, many attend Napa Valley College, the local community college. Last week Doug Ernst, the public information…
BY HANK REICHMAN The Knoxville News Sentinel reports that “University of Tennessee officials are investigating a claim of sexual harassment after reports surfaced online that a student received a zero on a geology quiz for answering a question about his lab instructor’s name with that of a semifamous lingerie model. Neither the student nor the…