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…
BY HANK REICHMAN The president of Williams College in Massachusetts, a supposedly “elite” liberal arts institution, has ordered the cancellation of a student-organized speaking engagement by an author characterized by many as a white supremacist. In a letter to the college community on Thursday, Adam Falk said the views espoused in the writings of John…
BY HANK REICHMAN For some time we have been repeatedly assaulted by exaggerated claims from the political Right that student objections to institutional racism and sexism on campuses violate freedom of speech by imposing an orthodoxy of “political correctness.” Conservative pundits have openly mocked student charges that racist and sexist behavior can be traumatic for…
BY HANK REICHMAN Scholars in Poland have rallied to the defense of one of the world’s leading Holocaust historians after reports that Poland intends to withdraw a national honor because he claimed that Poles were complicit in Nazi war crimes. Polish-American scholar Jan T. Gross, Professor of History at Princeton University, is threatened with being…