BY HANK REICHMAN Recently the AAUP and others have been calling attention to the growing phenomenon of targeted online (and direct) harassment of faculty members, which has become a major threat to the academic freedom of everyone in higher education. In January 2017, the AAUP issued a statement noting how individual faculty members “have been…
BY AARON BARLOW Most everything I’ve read about NYU’s Avital Ronell misses what should be the most significant point of the messy affair. Yes, Ronell should not be defended in knee-jerk fashion nor piled on by acrimonious former colleagues. Nor is it enough to bemoan the impact of the case on the classroom. What we really…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This item is a news update from the Boston Globe that was distributed today: White people need to stop reinforcing the stereotype that White people are not just stupid but ridiculously so. If I feel that I need to apologize for being White, it is because some people seem almost willfully…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In a June 28 article for the Associated Press, Eva Vergara has reported: After a long day of work, Sofia Brito fell asleep on a chair in an office at Chile’s Constitutional Court. She says she awoke abruptly to find her mentor, the court’s president, atop her and caressing her hair.…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today, May 22, two hundred tenured faculty members at the University of Southern California (USC) released an open letter to the school’s board of trustees calling for the resignation of university President C. L. Max Nikias, saying he had “lost the moral authority to lead” in the wake of revelations that a…
BY AARON BARLOW In “From Austerity to Attacks on Scholars,” an article for Inside Higher Ed, Syracuse University professor Dana Cloud writes, “I discovered how the people attacking me were organized and trained through right-wing radio programs and websites in the language to use against intellectuals; they were set off like arrows from a bow”…
POSTED BY KELLY HAND In his article recently published in the January–February issue of Academe magazine, “A New Reality? The Far Right’s Use of Cyberharassment against Academics,” Joshua A. Cuevas offers a firsthand account of being targeted by malicious online attacks using fabricated information. In counteracting these efforts to sabotage his professional reputation, Cuevas documented the…
BY TARIQ KHAN My name is Tariq Khan. I am a father of three young children, a U.S. Air Force Veteran, and a PhD candidate in History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I spend most of my time juggling parenting duties with researching and writing my dissertation, though I can sometimes be found…