MLK, J.B.’s Call and the March for Jobs and Freedom

BY TIRIEN ANGELA STEINBACH Tirien Angela Steinbach is the executive director of the East Bay Community Law Center, the community-based clinic for Berkeley Law School, where she graduated from law school in 1999.  Since its founding in 1988 by law students at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, EBCLC has become the largest provider…

Wendell Phillips: The Scholar in a Republic

BY HANK REICHMAN The other day, as part of an informal self-reeducation in American history prompted by our current political fix, I was rereading after many decades Richard Hofstadter’s 1948 The American Political Tradition, a series of portraits of leading American politicians from the founders to FDR.  Only one of Hofstadter’s subjects, the abolitionist Wendell…

New Divisions–Or Just Old Ones Renewed?

BY AARON BARLOW David Brooks writes in today’s The New York Times of “the fact that we’ve regressed from a sophisticated moral ethos to a primitive one.” This has always been a favorite conservative trope, that we should yearn for the beliefs and coherences of yesteryear. Yet it has no truth behind it, as any…

Historians Speak on Confederate Monuments

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a statement issued August 28 by the Council of the American Historical Association.  The AHA is also compiling an ongoing bibliography of the diverse perspectives of AHA members. The American Historical Association welcomes the emerging national debate about Confederate monuments. Much of this public statuary…

President Rudy Fichtenbaum’s Remarks at the 2017 Annual Meeting

  I believe that this is the 5th time that I have had the honor of addressing this body in my capacity as President of the AAUP. Let me start by thanking our wonderful staff. Without their hard work and dedication to our cause, we would cease to exist. While I cannot name and thank…

Women’s History Month

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH   Some links to resources of possible interest: Women’s History Month; National Women’s History Project; New York Times Learning Network: Celebrate Women’s History Month; Smithsonian Education: Women’s History Teaching Resources; Science NetLinks: Women’s History Month; National Education Association: Women’s History Month in the Classroom;  

The More Things Change…

POSTED BY JOERG TIEDE The following resolution was adopted by the Fifty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors on April 17, 1971. Misconceptions of tenure are commonplace. For many groups and individuals tenure has become a conveniently simple explanation for what they perceive as a variety of educational ills. Tenure is not the…

Can We Build a New Jefferson?

BY AARON BARLOW Teaching the Alien and Sedition Acts to my journalism students the other day, I concentrated on this passage: The vituperative quality of the opposition press began to worry even the Federalists more and more, especially President Adams (even though the Federalist press was doing pretty much the same thing). A touchy and…

On Faculty Solidarity

BY JOERG TIEDE If teachers do not stand fighting in the front rank for freedom of intelligence, the cause of the latter is well-nigh hopeless, and we are in for that period of intimidation, oppression, and suppression that goes, and goes rightly, by the name of Fascism and Nazi-ism. — John Dewey, 1935 The American Association of…