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…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH An ever-lengthening list of faculty have come under fire for tweets and other social-media posts that they have made. But anyone who actually looks regularly at Twitter feeds must know three things: first, the medium itself stokes extremes of expression; second, almost nothing that a faculty member has ever tweeted comes…
BY HANK REICHMAN Florida Governor Rick Scott declared a state of emergency; the University of Florida spent a half-million dollars on security; protesters were peaceful, if boisterous; and neo-Nazi nincompoop Richard Spencer managed to speak on the Gainesville campus for nearly two hours and even answered questions from the audience. (At one point CUNY Professor…
BY HANK REICHMAN I have occasionally on this blog posted items about the conflicted views of American conservatives about academic freedom, at times calling attention to the ideas of principled academic conservatives whose approach and arguments often run counter to the unfortunate hostility to higher education now rapidly gaining credibility on the right, and with…