Wayne Lanter retired from Southwestern Illinois College and wrote a book about his 25 years of experience with union battles at one of the most important sites of faculty labor activism. Lanter’s book, Defending the Citadel, details the ups and downs of these labor fights. John K. Wilson interviewed Lanter via email for Academe Blog…
Tonight at the Democratic National Convention, President Barack Obama called upon America to “cut in half the growth in tuition costs over the next 10 years.” I’m sure many conservatives will condemn that as yet another impossible promise brought by an overdose of hope. But there are a lot of ways that colleges and the…
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) just released their “annual list of America’s Best Colleges for Free Speech.” FIRE does great work in promoting free speech on college campuses, but I’ve often been critical of their ratings system for missing some campus policies that restrict free speech. In my book, Patriotic Correctness: Academic…
Ron Lipsman, a former senior associate dean at the University of Maryland, writes at Minding the Campus attacking tenure: “In effect, the only tenured professors who get the sack are those who have robbed a bank, raped a co-ed or pistol-whipped a colleague.” This is nonsense. Plenty of tenured professors do get fired every year…
Inside Higher Ed has a fascinating article about calls for censorship at a Palestinian university because a professor put up political cartoons on his office door, the most offensive of which, apparently, depicts “Islamic Superman” with a beard. President Khalil Hindi of Birzeit University responds to the criticism of his administration’s failure to defend academic…