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…
Vincent J. Roscigno, a Professor of Sociology at Ohio State University, has published a clever and insightful piece under the above title in the online magazine Counterpunch. The entire article is worth reading, but here are some choice excerpts: Equating the administrative bloating of public universities and the harm it has caused as akin to…
The following statement was issued today, July 20, 2015: The AAUP and AFT‐Wisconsin stand together in condemning the attacks on higher education that the Wisconsin Legislature included in its biennial budget, which Governor Walker signed into law last Monday. We call on the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents and the UW System and campus‐level…
Today’s Inside Higher Ed includes an exceptionally perceptive essay by Christopher Newfield, professor of literature and American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, cosponsor of the Remaking the University website, and a member of the Academe magazine advisory board, calling for a new strategy in defense of tenure. Everyone should read it. “So…
The following resolution was released by the two organizations on June 30: The American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), as the two national scholarly associations devoted to the study of all education and higher education, respectively, affirm the principle that academic freedom, grounded in the tenure…
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…
The two great parts of American higher education are the students and the faculty. The administrators are only around to facilitate the learning of the former and the teaching and research of the latter. Or that’s the way we imagine it. Over the past fifty years, the students have become customers instead of learners and…
The headline of today’s op-ed in the Chicago Tribune by William G. Bowen and Eugene M. Tobin was wonderful: “Scott Walker’s test of academic freedom.” And the first half of the essay, tracing the development of the “Wisconsin Magna Carta” in defense of academic freedom, and the threat posed by Walker, is also wonderful. And…
In a stunning and welcome development on the eve of a scheduled court hearing on Monday, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring announced today that “a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) has been agreed upon by Amherst County Attorney Ellen Bowyer, Saving Sweet Briar, Sweet Briar College and the Office of the Attorney General outlining a plan…