BY STEVE O’KANE Politics and morality are strange bedfellows. The famous sentence from Anna Karenina comes to mind: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Sometimes the night passes in restful harmony, the temperature is just right, the pillows are soft, the lights are out, and not a…
BY JOSHUA M. MYERS For a moment in 2021, the national media seemed to care about the Afghan people. But the recent discourse surrounding the US withdrawal from a twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan has revealed once again that the American corporate media is anything but an honest critic of the idea of American empire. We…
BY HANK REICHMAN This week, within a span of 24 hours, I read two newly published articles that so coincided with my recent thinking and writing (and, at least implicitly, with each other) that I immediately felt a bit jealous that I hadn’t written them. Of course, there’s plenty of space for multiple voices arguing…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the wake of a week of statewide campus protest against poor COVID-19 practices at Georgia’s state universities and colleges, more than 50 faculty members at the University of Georgia, full and associate professors in the life sciences, have announced that they will require masks in their classrooms, in violation of the…
BY EVA CHERNIAVSKY As we enter a fourth decade of life in the neoliberal university, where permanent austerity rules everywhere except in the swelling ranks of upper administration; where the pretense of shared governance has all but collapsed; where tenure lines are vanishing (particularly in the humanities and social sciences), and the faculty continues to…
BY RACHEL IDA BUFF AND S. ANI MUKHERJI We are pleased to announce the publication of volume 12 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. As coeditors, we agreed on the theme for the volume, “Practices of Academic Freedom in Times of Austerity,” late last summer—a time of cascading loss and despair, but also of inspiring…
BY AUDREY TRUSCHKE The following are remarks made at a virtual congressional briefing on “Hindu Supremacists attacks on Academic Freedom,” sponsored by a coalition of eighteen organizations in the United States on September 8, 2021. The remarks have been lightly edited for style and updated with a postscript on a recent academic conference. Hindu nationalism…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a statement issued today, September 17, by the Council of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT). For background on this case see this previous post and CAUT’s statement imposing censure. On April 22, the Council of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) took…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday, Kent Syverud, Chancellor and President of Syracuse University, and David Van Slyke, Dean of that institution’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, issued a statement in response to controversy that had emerged around a faculty member’s comments about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The faculty member, a tenure-track assistant…
BY HANK REICHMAN A group of 177 Stanford University professors from more than 40 departments, most in the physical and natural sciences, today made public a September 8 letter they sent to US Attorney General Merrick Garland calling for an end to a Trump administration program that sought to uncover alleged Chinese spies in American…