BY JOAN W. SCOTT In response to the growing influence of Hindutva, a Hindu supremacist ideology supported by India’s prime minister Narendra Modi and a growing number of Indians both within and outside that nation, a conference has been organized to analyze and contest the ideology. “Dismantling Global Hindutva” will take place on-line September 10–12.…
BY AARON ROUSSELL The article below appeared in the most recent Member News of PSU-AAUP (Portland State’s AAUP chapter for faculty and academic professionals). Drawing shamelessly on Anna Kornbluh’s adaptation of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, it alerts our members to the weaponization of the covid-19 crisis. We are fortunate to be unionized and able…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY Could we have a winner in the administrative malfeasance contest, COVID-19 division? I think we may! Of course, it’s too early to say. The entries keep rolling in. But this one is a contender. National University is requiring faculty to attend graduation at the San Diego Padres’ Petco Park in downtown San…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY On Friday, I posted the first part of this survey of what faculty face this fall at institutions in COVID-denialist states. Part I discussed conditions in Louisiana and Georgia. Here, I report what I heard from colleagues in Florida, Wisconsin, and Texas. * * * At the University of Florida, where no…
BY JENNIFER RUTH Legislative acts against the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) are blatant and egregious violations of academic freedom, as academic freedom has been defined by the AAUP from its inception in 1915. How did we get to this moment in which the state’s attempted interference in education rivals the McCarthy Era in…
BY DMITRY DUBROVSKY On June 21, Hank Reichman posted a piece in response to a decision taken earlier that day by the Russian state prosecutor designating Bard College as an “undesirable organization,” effectively terminating the New York-based school’s quarter-century long partnership with St. Petersburg State University. (See also articles on Inside Higher Ed here and…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week historian Garrett Felber reached a confidential settlement with the University of Mississippi, where in December 2020 his appointment as a tenure-track assistant professor was not renewed under abrupt and alarming circumstances. “I was terminated because of my public statements, including legitimate criticisms of the University. Rather than go to court…
BY JULIA SCHLECK The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of an op-ed piece published July 20, 2021 in the San Francisco Chronicle. From the nationwide spate of legislation targeting “critical race theory” to the recent controversy at Cal State East Bay, where crude and unscholarly claims about the “intelligence” of racial groups were included in an…
BY ALEX SMALL I recently read Tom Ginsburg’s article “How to Truly Protect Academic Freedom” with sympathetic disagreement. I share his concern over the many high-profile incidents that he cites, and I have lamented many of them with friends. I am an avid consumer (even tester?) of academic freedom, lodging dissents in my university’s academic…