BY JOHN K. WILSON Here’s an important point to remember this Halloween: Trump is a narcissistic con man dressed up as a presidential candidate, as I reveal in my book Trump Unveiled: Exposing the Bigoted Billionaire. It’s the scariest costume anyone will ever wear. Inside, he’s as hollow as a Trump piñata that my cats Sunspot and…
BY HANK REICHMAN “Why aren’t college faculties more racially diverse?” That’s the important question addressed in a recent column published in the Hechinger report and the Washington Post by Marybeth Gasman, professor of higher education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Penn Center for Minority Serving…
BY HANK REICHMAN Public higher education is “dying” in the US, with the pricing out of students from poorer backgrounds amounting to a “national tragedy in the making.” So warned Robert Reich, chancellor’s professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and secretary of labor in the Bill Clinton administration, in a…
BY HANK REICHMAN Very few academics were much surprised when it turned out that Donald Trump’s highly advertised “Trump University” turned out to be nothing more than a sleazy scam. After all, in some respects Trump’s con was not much different from that engaged in by too many other for-profit “educational” institutions, except, perhaps, that…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted to this blog “A Statement of Principles for Choosing New University of California Chancellors,” issued by the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), an AAUP partner organization. Yesterday, at UC Berkeley, where more than a dozen students, faculty, staff, alumni and foundation representatives serving on the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Recently the New York Times published an article entitled “Hillary Clinton’s College Plan Appeals to the Left, but Educators Have Doubts.” The thrust of the article was that while Clinton’s proposal to let students with families earning less than $125,000 a year attend public universities free has considerable appeal (and not just…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Here is a chart summarizing a recent Pew Research survey on how political ideology affects the perception of American institutions: The complete survey, including a link to a detailed breakdown of the results in PDF, can be found at: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/26/from-universities-to-churches-republicans-and-democrats-differ-in-views-of-major-institutions/ Education Dive has provided the following “highlights” of and “insights” about…
BY KELLY HAND We’re pleased to announce that the new volume of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom is out today. The Journal publishes scholarship on academic freedom and on its relation to shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining. Current and past volumes of the Journal of Academic Freedom, which receives funding from the AAUP Foundation,…
BY PETER N. KIRSTEIN In 2011, Saint Xavier University adjunct faculty voted to organize under the banner of the Illinois Education Association. President Christine Wiseman challenged the right of adjunct faculty at the Sisters of Mercy Catholic institution to unionize, in claiming a religious exemption under the First Amendment. Federal labour law, they argued, should not apply to…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Earlier today, UC-Berkeley Dean Carla Hesse rescinded her Sept. 13 suspension of the DeCal course on Palestine. But the controversy over her original suspension remains a hotly contested debate. Dean Hesse writes, “I did not request or require any revisions of the content of the course,” a claim questioned by some…