Writing for In These Times, Moshe E. Harvit reports that in a brief filed with the NLRB supporting its opposition to being forced to recognize and negotiate with the union organized by its adjunct faculty, Duquesne University explicitly acknowledged the truthfulness of the adjuncts’ testimony before the NLRB by threatening to terminate them for it.…
Steven Salaita, a tenured associate professor in the American Indian Studies program, was fired a year ago with a summary dismissal for tweets that were construed as lacking civility. A federal judge, Harry D. Leinenweber of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, has ruled against the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign…
The most recent issue of Academe displays on its cover a Bob Dylan lyric: “I’ll Tell It and Think It and Speak It and Breathe It.” An image appears at the upper left-hand corner of this webpage. Its provenance is the epic protest song, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Editor Aaron Barlow deftly situates the song on the cusp of the…
In a number of instances, I have been told that many on the Far Right are every bit as concerned about constraints on academic freedom as Progressives are. When I have pointed out that most of the attacks on academic freedom seem to have come from Far Right political figures and commentators who are responding…
As Maria indicates in her comment, the first half or so of this post is my own commentary. The material below the line is the item from the Department of Labor. I apologize for any confusion. One can argue that adjunct faculty whose primary employment is outside the college or university at which they are…
“My name is legion: for we are many.” Maybe that’s the faculty on Twitter these days. Including many who get themselves into ticklish situations—with no savior casting their devilish tweets into swine and herding them into oblivion in the sea. Yet they have sent themselves to Decapolis to publish, going home on their own. Maybe…
Today the New York Times reported that a 542-page study examining the involvement of the nation’s psychologists and their largest professional organization, the American Psychological Association (APA), in the harsh interrogations of the post-9/11 years “raises repeated questions about the collaboration between psychologists and officials at both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon.” The report concludes…
In an op-ed published by the Providence Journal in Rhode Island, James Baar identifies “Four Crises That Dog Higher Education”: 1. Inflation of product cost. 2. Deflation of product value. 3. Enablement of social and moral dissolution. 4. Lower-priced, knockoff and fraudulent competition. Given the space constraints on most op-ed pieces, Baar addresses each of…
The News-Gazette of Champaign, Illinois published yesterday in its Sunday edition an op-ed I wrote on my interpretation of the American Association of University Professors censure of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The censure resulted from the summary dismissal of Associate Professor Steven Salaita for his tweets on the war in Gaza last summer. The paper supplied the…