On January 23, 2014, Christopher G. Kennedy was reelected by his peers as chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. In the public relations announcement it praised his putative transformation of the board into an ethical model of leadership: “During his five years as chairman, the board has restored confidence in the…
Yesterday I posted a statement by the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), issued in response to a September 5 message to the UC Berkeley campus from Chancellor Nicholas Dirks that called “civility” and free speech “two sides of a single coin.” Also yesterday Dirks sent an email message to faculty, staff and…
The following is the text of a statement issued on September 11 by the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA): On Friday Sept. 5, Chancellor Dirks of UC Berkeley circulated an open statement to his campus community that sought to define the limits of appropriate debate at Berkeley. Issued as the campus approaches…
The following is the text of an open letter to the University of Illinois Board of Trustees from Safiya Umoja Noble, Assistant Professor, UCLA, and former faculty member, student, and development staff member at UIUC. The letter appeared on Noble’s blog. Dear University of Illinois Board of Trustees Members, I spent the last eight years…
Two days ago I posted a piece on this blog that asked, “Is ‘Incivility’ the New Communism?” In that post I suggested that recent attempts to enforce standards of “civility” at colleges and universities, often, as in the Salaita case at Illinois and the Marzec incident in Ohio, in response to pro-Palestinian expression, recalled previous…
Chad Taylor, the Democratic candidate for the Senate seat in Kansas currently held by the long-serving but vulnerable Republican Senator Pat Roberts, recently announced that he was withdrawing from the race. The move was widely seen as an attempt to improve the chances of the Independent candidate Greg Orman, who was consistently finishing ahead of…
Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man. New York: Dial, 1964. Thomas Berger had such a long and productive career that it is a mystery why he is not routinely included in discussions of the great American novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. One of the highlights of his career was the critical…
Over the last several weeks, Purdue University has announced that its School of Communications and its College of Technology have received $500,000 grants from President Mitch Daniels for creating, respectively, a three-year baccalaureate program and a competency-based program. In the media coverage, there has been a great deal of positive spin on the possibilities opened…
There is almost no contemporary fiction that I could confidently describe as being universally inoffensive. I mean this without any snideness whatsoever, but I don’t know how English faculty at Christian colleges and universities manage to teach any courses in contemporary literature. I occasionally teach an interdisciplinary Honors seminar called “The Meanings of Rivers,” in…
During the great red scare of the late 1940s and 1950s, many otherwise “liberal” politicians and, sadly, more than a few academics argued that faculty members who were Communists (actually in practice those who declined to publicly state they were not Communists or even those who refused to denounce others) forfeited the right to academic…