BY HANK REICHMAN With the countdown to what would be the largest strike of university faculty in U.S. history ticking away, California Faculty Association (CFA) leaders rebuked Chancellor Tim White and CSU Trustees Tuesday for failing to resolve the contract dispute with their faculty. The Trustees’ meeting March 8 and 9 was the last public…
Three days ago I posted a piece, which I called “Corporatizers Gone Wild,” about the controversy surrounding University of California at Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi’s acceptance of positions on corporate boards that either compete or do business with UC. UCLA history professor Michael Meranze, writing on the Remaking the University blog, has now used this…
BY HANK REICHMAN For those who don’t yet understand what academics mean when we talk about the “corporatization” of the university, a good way to begin learning might be to take a look at recent events surrounding the University of California (UC) at Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi, previously notorious for presiding over the pepper-spraying of…
BY HANK REICHMAN Support continues to build for the California Faculty Association (CFA)’s “Fight for Five.” The union, an AAUP affiliate representing 26,000 faculty, librarians, counselors and coaches in the 23-campus California State University system, has vowed to walk out for five days in mid-April if agreement is not reached on a salary settlement. CFA…
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…