BY HANK REICHMAN Jonathan Cole, professor and former provost at Columbia University, is a distinguished advocate for academic freedom whose work I have long admired. Last year he and his Columbia colleague, Akeel Bilgrami, edited an important collection of thoughtful essays, Who’s Afraid of Academic Freedom?, which I review along with several other titles in…
BY HANK REICHMAN As regular readers of this blog know well, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s efforts to decimate public funding for the University of Wisconsin System and erode the protections of tenure and shared governance have aroused broad opposition among faculty members. On the defensive, Walker has issued a series of misleading and outright false…
BY HANK REICHMAN The University of Chicago has earned well-merited praise for its powerful 2014 “Statement on Principles of Free Expression,” a document that has been endorsed by a growing number of institutions. That statement, authored by a committee chaired by Geoffrey R. Stone, Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law and former Provost…
BY HANK REICHMAN On June 4, following Committee A’s annual spring meeting, present and former AAUP leaders, activists, and staff members gathered in Washington to join family members and friends in honoring the memory of Jordan E. Kurland, who passed away in January at the age of 87, still actively employed by the AAUP. Jordan…
BY HANK REICHMAN Alice Dreger, the controversial author of Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar’s Search for Justice, an exciting and important defense of academic freedom in the sciences, who last year resigned a position at Northwestern University to protest the university’s censorship of sexual content in a faculty-sponsored publication, is once again…
After a successful two-day walkout of faculty across the United Kingdom led by the University and College Union, more than 1,000 scholars have resigned from their roles as external examiners, who are contracted to sit on exam boards at other universities to review students’ work and sign off final grades. A UCU spokesperson told The…
BY HANK REICHMAN Did that headline grab you? I had intended to title this post “The Ironies of Ken Starr,” but someone tweeted something like the above and I couldn’t resist stealing the idea for my title. It’s out of date anyway, because today Baylor University announced that Starr will resign as university president while…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last December, in response to the wave of student protests about racial injustice on campus, some of which advanced demands that could threaten academic freedom, I published an essay “On Student Academic Freedom.” In that essay, I wrote that student protesters have made and will again make mistakes. They will offend others…
BY HANK REICHMAN College and university faculty in the United Kingdom began a two-day strike today against the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA). Members of the University and College Union (UCU) are taking action after talks to resolve a dispute over a 1.1% pay offer collapsed last week. The UCU said the value…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last fall Yale University was one of the more prominent institutions where student demands for diversity and racial justice made headlines. I previously commented at some length on the Yale events in a November post, “Racism and Academic Freedom at Yale.” In a second post a few months later I commented as…