While the intellectual in me has always been a bit suspicious or patronizing of persons who read their daily devotional or Bible, I must confess that I have turned to literature in my life in what must be a very similar capacity. I have found comfort, reaffirmation, suffering, joy–I have been a participant and spectator…
Below is the text of a June 30 letter signed by Nathan Brown, President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), and addressed to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The letter protests recent Israeli incursions into Palestinian universities on the West Bank, which it calls…
Yesterday, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) filed four lawsuits charging that three state universities and one community college maintain unconstitutional speech codes and have restricted the free speech of students and faculty members. The institutions named in the lawsuits are Citrus College, in California, and Chicago State, Iowa State, and Ohio Universities. …
Writing for the New York Times (June 24, 2014), in a column titled “The Reality of Student Debt Is Different than the Cliches,” David Leonhardt reviews a recent study released by the Brookings Institute. These are the main assertions: (1) Student debt, on average, has actually not increased significantly. (2) Because the earnings of college…
The following is the text of the report of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure to the AAUP Annual Meeting, delivered by Committee Chair and AAUP First Vice-President Hank Reichman on June 14. The Committee’s official and complete report will appear as part of the annual Bulletin of the AAUP, published annually in the…
At this morning’s 100th meeting of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the AAUP membership voted unanimously to censure Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) for denying tenure to John Boyle without adequate cause and in retaliation for his department’s involvement in criticizing the administration, violating academic freedom and due process. Illinois AAUP Committee A Chair…
Rep. Alan Grayson is well known as a progressive advocate in Congress, and a strong supporter of civil liberties. That makes the bill he just proposed even more appalling. On May 30, 2014, the very same day that Grayson passed an important amendment banning funding for prosecuting journalists for refusing to reveal their sources, Grayson introduced H.R. 4776, “To prohibit…
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) recently issued a new report on disinvitations, which claims that conservatives are almost three times as likely as those on the left to encounter attempts at disinvitation of a campus speaker since 2000 based on an analysis of 192 incidents. Trying to document all the disinvitation attempts…
My wife hates Faulkner. With a passion. So when we got married, there was no problem with my raiding her book collection and appropriating the novelist’s Light in August. I still have the copy, its blue-and-white cover, inside my wife’s signature in a girl’s handwriting, and a few notes made in the margin, mostly dutiful…
University of Oregon President Michael Gottfredson has signed a new policy protecting academic freedom, which is being called one of the best policies in the country for defending academic freedom. The passage of this policy also refutes the false notion that academic unions undermine policy-making by a faculty senate. In this case, the AAUP/AFT union president chaired…