Cary Nelson has an essay at InsideHigherEd today (along with Michael Rothberg) on the Salaita case. Here’s my comment on Nelson’s piece. First, I must note that absolutely nothing in Nelson’s essay is relevant to the actual reasons given by the chancellor and the trustees for firing Salaita. They have never questioned Salaita’s academic credentials,…
AcademeBlog invited Jay Schalin, Director of Policy Analysis at The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy to respond to a critique by John K. Wilson of Schalin’s essay on Gene Nichol and the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund at UNC-Chapel Hill. Below is Schalin’s response, which is crossposted at the Pope Center. No…
These are dark days for conservatives: 7 years of President Obama, gay marriage spreading across the land, health insurance coverage growing every day, and a collection of mediocre Republican candidates that make the words “President Clinton” seem like the future rather than the past. It’s enough to make a conservative blurt out “Jiggery-pokery” and bemoan…
I have an essay about the Salaita case posted today at University World News. Salaita’s dismissal and the case of Sara Goldrick-Rab may lead some people to think that professors must never use Twitter, but I think that would be a mistake. Twitter doesn’t cause controversial statements. There’s nothing about 140 characters that makes people…
Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of educational policy and sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is under fire for tweeting to some incoming freshman an article about the budget cuts and attacks on tenure at her institution. The campus College Republicans started a campaign denouncing her tweets as “disgusting and repulsive” and declared, “The…
Earlier this year, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Governors ordered the closing of the law school’s Poverty Center in an act of political retaliation against its outspoken director, Gene Nichol. The AAUP condemned the decision. This month, Nichol announced that Center would be replaced by the new North Carolina Poverty Research…
Northwestern University has recently attracted attention for the attempts to silence a controversial medical journal it publishes called Atrium. I’ve previously criticized Northwestern for its failure to protect academic freedom in cases of sexual content. Sadly, the efforts to suppress Atrium seem to be part of a disturbing pattern. Last year, Northwestern professor Alice Dreger, author of…
The US Supreme Court will hear the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, where some anti-union high school teachers are trying to avoid paying an agency fee to the union that represents them, as part of the so-called “right to work” campaign. Let’s ignore for a moment the devastating effects such a ruling against…
The headline of today’s op-ed in the Chicago Tribune by William G. Bowen and Eugene M. Tobin was wonderful: “Scott Walker’s test of academic freedom.” And the first half of the essay, tracing the development of the “Wisconsin Magna Carta” in defense of academic freedom, and the threat posed by Walker, is also wonderful. And…