POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN I previously posted this in 2016. The following was written by Martin Luther King, Jr. and first published in the February 1947 edition of the Morehouse College Student Newspaper. King was 18 years old. As I engage in the so-called “bull sessions” around and about the school, I too often find…
BY HANK REICHMAN “We are deeply concerned that the crisis of the American university–the decline of tenure-track jobs and universities’ eroding commitment to the humanities and social sciences–has created a structural crisis for scholarship.” So write the editors of the Journal of the Early Republic, published by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of an address delivered remotely, via Zoom, to the concluding session of a conference, “Universities at the Crossroads: Academic Freedom in a Changing World,” at GAU-Georgian American University, Tbilisi, Georgia, on October 1. Let me begin by thanking the organizers of this most important and interesting conference…
BY HANK REICHMAN One of the country’s most prominent evangelical Christian activists, Karen Swallow Prior holds a PhD in English Literature from the University at Buffalo, taught for two decades at the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, and is currently Research Professor of English and Christianity and Culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. In May,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Seven professors and a college student in Florida’s public higher education institutions filed suit yesterday to block a new state law that Governor Ron DeSantis calls the “Stop WOKE Act” and which curtails instruction about race and gender as well as much race-based expression in private business. The Florida and national branches…
BY HANK REICHMAN At the AAUP’s biennial meeting last month I had occasion to pick up a copy of Neo-Nationalism and Universities: Populists, Autocrats, and the Future of Higher Education, by UC Berkeley education professor John Aubrey Douglass and a group of other contributors. The book is a collection of essays treating the impact on…
BY HANK REICHMAN The American Library Association (ALA) and a coalition of more than 25 groups have come together in support of the association’s Unite Against Book Bans campaign to raise awareness about the recent rise in book challenges in public libraries and schools, the association announced on Monday. “This is a dangerous time for…
BY HANK REICHMAN Four journalists associated with an independent Moscow student magazine were sentenced April 12 to two years’ “corrective labor” for creating and posting an online video in which they defended young Russians’ freedom of assembly. Armen Aramyan, Natasha Tyshkevich, Alla Gutnikova and Volodya Metelkin, participants in the editorial collective of the journal DOXA,…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following are excerpts from a special report, The State of America’s Libraries, released today by the American Library Association. Librarians have always been on the front lines in the fight to protect the freedom to read. But in 2021, libraries found themselves at the center of attacks orchestrated by conservative…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN In the ongoing discussions over the relationship between free speech and academic freedom and debates over the rights of outside speakers versus those of student protesters, an article published yesterday in Times Higher Education makes some excellent points. The author, George Letsas, a philosophy professor at University College London, writes in…