Last year, as Christmas approached, I gathered some articles that seemed to suggest that we weren’t quite understanding concept of “holiday spirit.” Here are the headlines to those articles: “Six Toys That Could Make a Progressive’s Head Explode” “A Jolly Christmas, Retailers Count the Extra Days” “Americans Buying More Gifts for That Special Someone—Themselves” “Five…
Yesterday John K. Wilson wrote about the Kansas Board of Regents new policy mandating institutional oversight of the blog posts, tweets, and other public digital communications of faculty and staff at Kansas colleges and universities. Because it is not restricted to communications made with institutional resources, this policy goes well beyond violating of academic freedom,…
As the first national AAUP president from a collective bargaining chapter, I frequently heard the Association described by some as “just another union” and by others as an irrelevant and ineffectual vestige of a less complicated and more innocent time. There are those who view the staff and the elected leadership as either politically naïve…
At Wright State, we have “Garcetti language” in our contract, protecting criticism of the administration as an aspect of academic freedom. We don’t abuse this right, but if our administration endorsed the sort of policy just approved by the Kansas Board of Regents for the public universities across that state, we would lambaste them on…
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis drew upon his prominence as the first American recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature to issue a national warning against the dangers of fascism. Huey Long was emerging as a likely candidate in the 1936 presidential election, and in the satiric novel It Can’t Happen Here, Lewis provided an extended…
Here are some relatively recent headlines that I have collected: Former Al-Qaeda Barber Seized in Iraq American without Arab Roots Almosts Wins “Arabs Got Talent!” Andy Kauffman’s Brother Says He’s the Victim of a Hoax Biologists Use Cannons to Capture and Tag Endangered Birds Celebrating the Holidays behind Bars China to Send Pig Sperm to…
An AAUP report this month on the case of John Boyle (see more about it in the post by Peter Kirstein earlier today), an assistant professor of linguistics at Northeastern Illinois University, raises once more the problem of using the vague term “collegiality” in questions of the granting of tenure. The NEIU president, an AAUP…
In August 2013, Tim Murphy at Mother Jones described the sinkhole at Bayou Corne as “the biggest ongoing disaster in the United State that you haven’t heard of.” That was already a year after the sinkhole had first appeared. Writing for the Daily Kos, Jen Hayden offered the following overview: “One night in August 2012,…