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BY JOHN K. WILSON Earlier today, UC-Berkeley Dean Carla Hesse rescinded her Sept. 13 suspension of the DeCal course on Palestine.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…
The following letter from Dean Carla Hesse rescinds the suspension of the revised Palestine course at the University of California at Berkeley. BERKELEY: College of Letters & Science Office of the Deans 101 Durant Hall #2920 September 19, 2016 DEPARTMENT CHAIRS OF THE DIVISION OF SOCIAL SCIENCES DIVISIONAL COUNCIL OF THE ACADEMIC SENATE (UC…
By DEBORAH MUTNICK Saturday, September 17, three days after the LIU administration ended its lockout of faculty in the midst of contract negotiations, I feel a little like Wile E. Coyote running off the edge of a cliff. I can’t stop running. As I hover over that abyss, before resuming the more or less normal…
By DEBORAH MUTNICK Week 2 of the LIU Brooklyn lockout. I imagine her holed up in her office in Nassau County on Long Island, far from the Brooklyn campus she seems to be destroying, yelling at administrators to do a better job of pretending to be professors or dictating orders to a secretary sitting at…
BY HANK REICHMAN The latest work by celebrated gonzo journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech, is a book-length essay that tries to pillory the academic study of language, targeting along the way for special vitriol none other than Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky. I have zero expertise in this field and have…
BY HANK REICHMAN The Labor Day lockout of faculty at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus has placed that institution on the front lines of the battle for higher education’s future. It’s a big national story — the first time ever that a college or university administration in the U.S. has locked out its faculty —…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the California Supreme Court let stand an appellate court ruling in the teacher tenure case, Vergara v. California, bringing to a close an effort by so-called school reformers to challenge tenure and other rights of K-12 teachers protected by state law. The Vergara litigation was closely watched across the country as a test…