POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The American Historical Association (AHA) has issued a statement urging a reckoning with the United States’ deplorable record of violence against African Americans, a record that stretches back centuries. The killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers stands within this sordid national tradition of racist violence. It…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday I posted to this blog a piece that compared the current protests against police violence with the urban rebellions of prior years, especially the 1960s. In it I wrote that “the looting, arson, and window-smashing that have marred the overwhelmingly peaceful protests . . . may have been carried out by…
BY HANK REICHMAN No right-thinking person can fail to condemn the looting, arson, and window-smashing that have marred the overwhelmingly peaceful protests that have swept the nation for the past week in the wake of the brutal slaying of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. These criminal actions may have been carried out by a…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH If one showed most Americans this photo, they would have no idea who the woman was: If one added this next photo, a few might guess that she was Eleanor Roosevelt, standing in the background as her husband signed another piece of landmark New Deal legislation: But, much like Eleanor Roosevelt,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Confined to home by the COVID-19 pandemic, my wife and I last night were looking for entertainment and stumbled upon a 1921 silent film classic, The Blot, on Turner Classic Movies. Almost totally by chance we watched a few moments of TCM’s intro and soon were hooked. The Blot was directed by…
BY AARON BARLOW Dr. Bruce Gilley, are you trying to pick a fight? You are a professor of Political Science at Portland State University and have penned a disturbing piece, “Was It Good Fortune to be Enslaved by the British Empire?” that appeared on September 30, 2019 on the website of the National Association of…
BY HANK REICHMAN On October 30 I had the great honor and privilege of delivering the 29th annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Academic Freedom Lecture at the University of Michigan. In 1954 the University of Michigan suspended and then terminated Professors H. Chandler Davis and Mark Nickerson, a tenured faculty member, and suspended but then reinstated…
BY HANK REICHMAN Leon Wofsy, Emeritus Professor of Immunology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, died August 25 at the age of 97. Although I have been a graduate student and instructor at Berkeley and lived most of my adult life within a mile or two…
BY HENNING SCHROEDER Woody Allen got it right, years before leadership seminars became the latest craze in higher education. In the 1971 movie Bananas his character Fielding Mellish goes on a rant after he gets dumped by his girlfriend, “Can you believe that? She says I’m not leader enough for her—who is she looking for,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Recently a minor brouhaha has emerged over the “Chicago Principles,” shorthand for the University of Chicago’s 2015 “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression.” The Principles have been endorsed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and several dozen universities, but dismissed as a “marketing ploy” by others. Then,…