BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday word came that Simon Newman, the notorious president of Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland, had resigned. Newman, readers will recall, was the fool who spoke of drowning at-risk freshmen like “bunnies” and who summarily dismissed (and subsequently reinstated) two long-time faculty members for “disloyalty.” (For background go here, here, and…
BY HANK REICHMAN Over the past several months this blog has posted a number of items about the growing and dangerous trend of conducting searches for top administrators in secret, with no public disclosure of candidates. The disastrous consequences of such searches have already been witnessed at the Universities of Missouri and Iowa and have…
BY HANK REICHMAN This Friday, March 4, Alice Dreger is scheduled to speak on academic freedom at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, under the sponsorship of the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education (WISCAPE). Dreger is the author of Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, an engaging, personal,…
The following essay by University of California at Santa Barbara English professor Christopher Newfield appeared originally on the Remaking the University blog and is republished with permission. Although the three institutions discussed are from the San Francisco Bay Area, the issues addressed are ones we faculty members are confronting everywhere. The New Normal Isn’t Normal–It…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted a piece about the decision by Williams College President Adam Falk to cancel a speech by John Derbyshire, a controversial conservative. Then yesterday William Covino, President of California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA), announced that he would cancel a talk by Ben Shapiro, editor-at-large of the notorious Breitbart…
BY HANK REICHMAN In June, 2014, California Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu overturned California statutes guaranteeing due process protections for K-12 teachers with more than two years experience (so-called “teacher tenure”) and layoff by seniority. The case, Vergara v. California, was the topic of a number of entries on this blog. The basic argument…
BY HANK REICHMAN Melissa A. Click, the communications professor whose actions during a student protest last fall sparked controversy, has been fired by the University of Missouri’s Board of Curators, according to a statement from the system. The action was apparently taken last night, in a closed session, by a vote of 4-2. “The board…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last year George Yancy, a professor of philosophy at Emory University, conducted a series of 19 interviews with philosophers and public intellectuals on the issue of race, published in the New York Times feature “The Stone,” which seeks to bring the insights of philosophy (as in “the philosopher’s stone”) to bear on issues…
BY HANK REICHMAN President Barack Obama today announced his intent to nominate Carla D. Hayden as Librarian of Congress. Hayden would be the first woman and the first African American to hold the position. Carla Hayden is CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland, a position she has held since 1993. She…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last summer 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…