BY HENRY REICHMAN The national AAUP has called on the University of Missouri to lift its suspension of Melissa A. Click, the assistant professor who was videotaped attempting to remove a student journalist from the site of a campus protest. In a letter emailed yesterday to the Columbia campus’s interim chancellor, Henry C. (Hank) Foley,…
The AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin today issued the following statement on draft policies on tenure issued by University of Wisconsin regents, which incorporate a number of sound elements, but fall short in other areas. To download the statement as a .pdf file, go here. For more on these proposals see UW-Milwaukee AAUP…
BY HANK REICHMAN If you want evidence about why academic freedom matters, then read this piece from the Washington Post about Virginia Tech Professor of Civil Engineering Marc Edwards, “The Heroic Professor Who Helped Uncover the Flint Lead Water Crisis.” Last week, bowing to intense pressure from the beleaguered people of Flint, Michigan Governor Rick…
BY HENRY REICHMAN Over the weekend Phil Matier and Andrew Ross of the San Francisco Chronicle broke a story [behind a paywall] that revealed growing concerns among UC Berkeley faculty about a previously secret decision by University of California President Janet Napolitano, former Secretary of Homeland Security, to install new computer hardware capable of monitoring computer…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week, Robert Quinn, the executive director of Scholars at Risk, an international network of higher education institutions in 39 countries with headquarters at New York University, published an op-ed piece in the Washington Post entitled “The War on Education.” The attack last week at Pakistan’s Bacha Khan University that killed 22 and…
BY HENRY REICHMAN In an important piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education last week, “Watch What You Say: How Fear is Stifling Academic Freedom,” Fredrik deBoer, who teaches at Purdue University, made the essential connection between violations of academic freedom and the academic labor market. Seeking to explain “the pervasive sense of fear that…
BY HENRY REICHMAN Teresa Buchanan, the Louisiana State University (LSU) education professor terminated over strong objections from a faculty review committee and the Faculty Senate, last week filed a federal First Amendment lawsuit against the president of LSU and other top administrators for violating her free speech and due process rights by firing her last…
BY HENRY REICHMAN The following statement was released January 20 by the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA). A link to their petition can be found below. The University of California is currently considering introducing a new pension plan for its employees hired after 2016. These proposed changes will dramatically reduce pension benefits…
BY HENRY REICHMAN The Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund (IIE-SRF) awards fellowships to academics who are facing threats in their home countries. These fellowships support visiting academic appointments at institutions of higher learning outside the fellows’ home countries, where they may continue their teaching and/or research in safety. The program’s emphasis is on…