POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is excerpted from a December 7 article on the website of the Index on Censorship. A group of court reporters scurried along the halls of Istanbul’s massive Çağlayan Courthouse on the morning of 7 December, taking pictures of the tables showing the trial schedules of several high criminal courts…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week word arrived that Princeton University history graduate student Xiyue Wang, sentenced in July by the Iranian government to ten years in prison for alleged espionage, is being transferred from general detention to Ward 7, a more extreme prison unit run by Iran’s intelligence agency. When Wang arrived there, his…
BY MICHAEL DECESARE In 2016, the AAUP’s annual meeting voted to add The College of Saint Rose to the censure list. The most egregious of the administration’s and governing board’s many transgressions had been the termination of 23 tenured and tenure-track faculty appointments as part of a top-down “academic prioritization” process that eliminated a number of…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today the AAUP released a new report, “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom.” The report details troubling threats to academic freedom in the physical and natural sciences that have been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s hostility to science. International scientific exchange and, especially, the charging of innocent Chinese or…
BY HANK REICHMAN Jordan Klepper’s “The Opposition” on Comedy Central tries to pick up where the old Colbert Report left off. Like Colbert, Klepper takes on the persona of an arrogant right-wing commentator to satirize the foibles and falsehoods often promoted by such. Last night his “correspondents” took on Turning Point, USA, sponsor of the…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Below is the text of an open letter signed by 135 members of the University of Nebraska faculty expressing concern that “decisions involving the future of the University are being made without transparency or proper governance and under improper exertions of influence by the legislative and executive branches of the state…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Last week the AAUP filed an amicus brief supporting a challenge to a statute and policy in Texas that compel faculty to permit concealed handguns in college classrooms. The brief in Glass v. Paxton, filed jointly with the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On January 31, the AAUP issued a statement on “Targeted Online Harassment of Faculty,” which decried how a growing number of faculty members nationwide “have been subject to threats of physical violence, including sexual assault, through hundreds of e-mails, calls, and social media postings” in response to viewpoints expressed on electronic…
BY HANK REICHMAN Members of the New York University (NYU) faculty have begun to speak out more forcefully against religious discrimination and limitations on academic freedom at the university’s United Arab Emirates (UAE) branch campus in Abu Dhabi. Last week a majority of the senior faculty of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute signed a…
BY HANK REICHMAN The National Park Service has pulled funding for a Black Panther Party legacy project to be undertaken at the University of California at Berkeley in response to criticism by conservative organizations, according to reports in the San Francisco Chronicle and the East Bay Times. In September, the Park Service announced that it…