BY JENNIFER RUTH When I was a junior faculty member, one of my senior colleagues invited me to a regular happy hour he attended with Portland State’s top administrators. The man who was the provost at the time was there, as well as a head HR person, a legal affairs person, the director of facilities,…
BY DANIEL A. SEGAL On April 15 of this year, Pitzer College’s Title IX Coordinator informed me that a student had filed a complaint against me alleging both “harassment on the grounds of sex/gender” and “harassment on the grounds of ancestry.” The case ended with a determination that there were no violations of policy, no…
BY DANIELLE SLAUGHTER Miguel Cardona Secretary, US Department of Education Dear Secretary Cardona, My name is Danielle Slaughter, and I’m an independent scholar, digital organizer, and mother of two young children. In 2017, I made the difficult decision to transition out of academia. I was pregnant with my second child, and, after the struggles I…
BY AUDREY TRUSCHKE The following are remarks made at a virtual congressional briefing on “Hindu Supremacists attacks on Academic Freedom,” sponsored by a coalition of eighteen organizations in the United States on September 8, 2021. The remarks have been lightly edited for style and updated with a postscript on a recent academic conference. Hindu nationalism…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday, Kent Syverud, Chancellor and President of Syracuse University, and David Van Slyke, Dean of that institution’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, issued a statement in response to controversy that had emerged around a faculty member’s comments about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The faculty member, a tenure-track assistant…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Readers of this blog may recall that shortly after the vice-presidential debate history professor Lora Burnett was hounded by trolls for Twitter comments that referred to Vice-President Pence as a “demon” and that her college administration buckled under the pressure to denounce her in a notorious October 12 statement. I blogged…
BY DREW MCKEVITT Last week historian Lora Burnett at Collin College in Texas was the latest target of online harassment fomented by the website Campus Reform, only to be thrown under the bus by her administration in violation of its own academic freedom policies. Guest blogger Drew McKevitt, Associate Professor of History at Louisiana Tech…
BY HANK REICHMAN Historian Lora Burnett has been completing a book on the culture wars and the conflict over “western civilization.” She never thought she would have to add a chapter to her book about her own experiences as a professor. Until yesterday. Burnett, who goes by L.D. Burnett on Twitter where she has over…
BY HANK REICHMAN While most attention these days is focused on the presidential and congressional elections, here in California a major battle is shaping up over Proposition 22, an initiative that would repeal a law, Assembly Bill 5, requiring most so-called gig workers to be provided the rights of employees as opposed to being treated…
BY RACHEL IDA BUFF Last week, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee students organized a Peaceful Protest Against Professor Betsey Schoeller. On a warm summer evening, the event drew about 250 people, most of them young, many of them people of color. Most wore masks and stood in small clusters around Spaights Plaza, a gathering place in the…