A few days ago, a University of North Carolina Board of Governors’ working group recommended shutting down three centers on university campuses, including Chapel Hill’s Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity — even though the center is self-funding. Critics of the decision, including John Charles “Jack” Boger, dean of the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law,…
Two additional documents are now available for those who have been following the controversy sparked by the refusal of the board of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) to accept funding for a dissertation fellowship program from eminent scholar Stephen F. Cohen and his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, because the program…
The following is the text of a letter to the Executive Committee of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, written by David Ransel, Robert F. Byrne Professor Emeritus of History at Indiana University, and signed by 126 134 142 additional scholars in the field. The complete list of signatories follows the text. …
An article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a conference held at the libertarian Cato Institute promoting a report from the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, which concludes that conservative-leaning academic centers on college and university campuses founded by wealthy donors “are not just surviving but thriving.” The report estimates…
From Kansas, the state that gave us the most repressive social media policy in the country, a negative model for defenders of academic freedom everywhere, now comes HB 2234, a proposed piece of legislation that declares: The state board of regents, the board of trustees of any community college, the board of regents of any…
The Board of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies on Tuesday released a “detailed clarification” of its controversial decision to reject an offer by Professor Stephen F. Cohen, his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and the KAT Foundation to fund a dissertation research fellowship program named for Cohen and his late mentor, Robert…
On Friday, the Executive Committee of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) posted on the Association’s website a “clarification” of its position on the controversial rejection by the Association’s board of a sizeable donation from the KAT Foundation to fund dissertation fellowships and to be named for Professor Stephen Cohen and…
Recently considerable attention has been paid on this blog and elsewhere to potential threats to academic freedom posed by the undue influence of outside donors on scholarship. One thinks immediately, of course, of efforts by the Koch brothers at Florida State and elsewhere to fund academic positions that reflect their personal ideology and of the…
As regular readers of this blog know, I have been posting reports on the accreditation controversy at City College of San Francisco (CCSF) ever since the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) issued its “show cause” order in early July 2012. (The most recent post, from September 2014, is here, at the end…
In case you missed it, Jeffrey J. Williams, professor of English and of literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University, published a terrific piece this morning on Inside Higher Ed that convincingly debunks the pretensions of those who would cut educational costs through technological innovation (and “creative disruption”) at the expense of both students…