Inside Higher Ed has a lengthy story about the University of Illinois administration’s justifications for firing Steven Salaita. What’s really important about today’s story is this revelation that the top fundraising official at the University of Illinois Foundation had emailed Chancellor Phyllis Wise and other top U of I fundraisers, telling her “Dan, Molly, and…
Godwin’s Law says that online arguments devolve into comparisons with Hitler or Nazis. We can extend that, I think, to almost any American argument involving politics and include “fascist” in the list of comparables: A student at Clemson University in South Carolina, in order to bring attention to the university’s past involvement in racism, has…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign chancellor Phyllis Wise has written an open letter to the campus (copied below) explaining her decision not to allow the hiring of Steven Salaita. The letter is an appalling attack on academic freedom and a rejection of the basic values that a university must stand for. Wise argues, “What we…
In coordination with Chancellor Phyllis Wise’s letter defending the Steven Salaita firing, the University of Illinois Board of Trustees today issued a letter of support (pdf here, and copied below) endorsing her decision. Disturbing, the Board of Trustees declares “our collective and unwavering support of Chancellor Wise and her philosophy of academic freedom and free…
This week the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a right-leaning group founded by Lynne Cheney (aka Darth Vader’s wife) released a report endorsed by a group of twenty-three trustees, administrators, and a handful of largely conservative faculty from elite institutions, headed by Benno Schmidt, former President of Yale University and Chair of the…
The following is a link to an article I published about textbooks. I resolve to do something concrete about this problem, and one part of the solution will be abandoning the practice of using textbooks for certain courses. I hope others will follow and offer suggestions. I hope others may already be teaching without “required” textbooks. http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/22/the-trouble-with-textbooks-a-great-american-rip-off/
By Nicholas Burbules, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign I want to thank Mr. Wilson for sending us his posting on “Shared Governance and the Salaita Case” and inviting us to respond. Joyce Tolliver and I do call for an honest debate in our editorial. We fully accept that there are serious, principled positions on different…
I spoke on a podcast, This Week at InsideHigherEd, about the Salaita case, along with former Barnard president Judith Shapiro, who argued that the Salaita case indicated the need for more shared governance. I would argue that the Salaita case is a good reason to understand what shared governance really means. Shared governance doesn’t mean that…
The New York Post recently ran a story by Carl Campanile under this headline: “College Liberals Spurn $10M Gift from the Koch Brothers.” Mitchell Langbert, a faculty member in the Business School at Brooklyn College, had been in extended discussions with the Koch Brothers Foundation about establishing a “financial center” within the Business School. When…
Readers of this blog who have been following developments in the case of Professor Steven Salaita, whose appointment to a tenured position at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana was revoked, apparently in response to his controversial Twitter postings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, may find a recent analysis of the case by Michael C. Dorf, Robert…