BY HANK REICHMAN Matthew Hedges On Wednesday, during a court session lasting all of five minutes, British scholar Matthew Hedges was sentenced to life in prison for espionage by the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Hedges, a 31-year-old student at Durham University, was arrested May 5 at Dubai airport as he was departing after a two-week…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a victory for academic freedom, U.S. student Lara Alqasem, who is of Palestinian descent, will be allowed to enter Israel to study at Hebrew University after the country’s Supreme Court today accepted her appeal of the decision to prevent her entry. Alqasem, whom the government claimed was a BDS activist based…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN A group of 120 academics and human rights activists of Iranian origin have called on Iran to free imprisoned Princeton University graduate student Xiyue Wang, who was arrested in Tehran by agents of Iran’s Intelligence Ministry in 2016 while he was conducting archival research and sentenced to ten years in prison…
BY HANK REICHMAN On Monday, the Association of University Heads of Israel sent a strongly-worded letter to Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan warning of damage caused to Israel by the ministry’s decision to bar American student Lara Alqasem from entering the country, the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports. The letter came a day after…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this month the Canadian Association of University Teachers released results of the first national survey of contract academic staff, which is what Canadian universities call faculty hired on contingent non-tenure-track appointments. The findings of the report, Out of the Shadows: Experiences of Contract Academic Staff, will be familiar to U.S.…
BY JOAN W. SCOTT Threats to academic freedom abound the world over and it is dismaying to confront one crisis situation after another. The latest news comes from Birzeit University, in the West Bank. Professors there, and at other Palestinian universities in the Occupied Territories, who hold foreign passports have been prevented by the Israeli…
BY DAVID KOCIEMBA The 13th Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor international conference this year was about organizing solutions to the international problem of faculty contingency. Held in San Jose this year August 3-5, COCAL presenters and attendees came from Mexico, the United States, Quebec, and English-speaking Canada. As this blog’s readers well know, contingent faculty…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The other day I posted an item reporting efforts by the government of Hungary to ban programs in gender studies. Yesterday the following letter was sent to Jozsef Bodis, Hungarian Minister of Education: Minister of Education Hungary jozsef.bodis@emmi.gov.hu Dear Minister of Education, We write to protest the Hungarian government’s proposed law…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week Hungarian universities received 24 hours from the Ministry of Human Capacities and the Ministry of Justice to comment on a proposed amendment, which declares that gender studies courses may no longer be offered in Hungary, the Hungarian economic and political weekly Heti Világgazdaság (HVG.hu) reported yesterday. According to a report…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This item is from Labour Start, which reports on labor issues and supports worker activism internationally. The details on the workers’ hours and compensation are pretty shocking: In South Korea, workers at IT software giant Oracle have been on strike since 16 May after negotiations for a first collective bargaining agreement with the…