BY HANK REICHMAN I’m a historian of Russia by training, but I guess I didn’t realize that there’s apparently no double jeopardy rule, at least with respect to sentencing, in Russia. Turns out that I—and many others—celebrated too soon when back in December we learned of the release of renowned Marxist sociologist and university professor…
BY HANK REICHMAN Sociologist, antiwar activist, and internationally renowned Marxist thinker Boris Kagarlitsky, a professor at the Moscow Higher School of Economics and head of the Moscow think tank The Institute for Globalization Studies and Social Movements, has been released after paying a fine of 600,000 rubles ($6,600) for “justifying terrorism” in comments he made…
BY HANK REICHMAN A bit over two years ago I posted to this blog a piece about a decision by Russia’s prosecutor general to designate New York’s Bard College as an “undesirable organization.” Since 1997, Bard had been collaborating with St. Petersburg State University, offering a program of open enrollment liberal arts courses for students…
BY HANK REICHMAN Sociologist and internationally renowned Marxist thinker Boris Kagarlitsky, a professor at the Moscow Higher School of Economics and head of the Moscow think tank The Institute for Globalization Studies and Social Movements, was arrested by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) on July 25. He stands accused of “justifying terrorism” under Part…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN This blog has regularly posted items in support of faculty and students resisting attacks on academic freedom at universities in Turkey (see, for examples, here, here, and here; see also from Academe magazine, Fall 2019, here). Now Turkish universities are facing another crisis: the aftermath of the devastating earthquakes that hit…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of an address delivered remotely, via Zoom, to the concluding session of a conference, “Universities at the Crossroads: Academic Freedom in a Changing World,” at GAU-Georgian American University, Tbilisi, Georgia, on October 1. Let me begin by thanking the organizers of this most important and interesting conference…
BY JENNIFER RUTH Last week, I interviewed Professor Shiu Wen-tang (許文堂), President of the Taiwan Association of University Professors. Given the attention in America paid to US Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit and the aftermath (namely, Chinese military aggression), it seemed an apt time to introduce readers to the faculty organization in Taiwan dedicated to Taiwan’s…
BY JENNIFER RUTH China’s retaliation for Nancy Pelosi’s trip continued last week, as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) launched a second wave of live fire drills around Taiwan. “China has threatened Taiwan militarily for years, and it continues to upgrade its efforts,” Taiwan’s foreign minister Joseph Wu said at a press conference on August 9th.…
Note: At the end of April, the editors of the Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, penned an editorial supporting BDS and Palestinian liberation. In response,150 members of the Harvard Faculty wrote a statement criticizing the editorial. Another group of faculty penned their own response, which was published in the Harvard Crimson. This letter is…
BY SHU WAN In the past few years, the Chinese government’s consistent interventions with—and suppression of—electronic resources in academic libraries in the nation have become an internationally controversial issue. One example of such censorship was a 2017 incident involving the China Quarterly. A statement by the journal’s publisher, Cambridge University Press, noted that “all international…