BY HARVEY J. GRAFF Today’s campaigns to ban books in schools—nationally organized and well-funded by right-wing donors and interest groups—are unprecedented, unconstitutional, and inhumane. Their instigators, unlike predecessors who led past campaigns, are ignorant of the texts they seek to erase, and sometimes burn. They have no understanding of “the people” or “public interest”; children’s…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorating the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Perhaps fittingly for our time, it is marked by the revelation that on January 10, by a 10-0 vote, the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board removed from the middle school curriculum Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, which tells the…
BY Z. W. TAYLOR, PAT SOMERS, AND JOSH CHILDS The AAUP outlines a four-pronged definition of academic freedom, although it is not codified by any specific case law or statute. Dozens of educational organizations—including the American Psychological Association, the Association for the Study of Higher Education, and the National Education Association, among many others—have endorsed…
BY HANK REICHMAN I should have expected that those politicians demanding the removal from schools of books on “critical race theory” and other titles dealing with race and gender that might cause “discomfort” would inevitably fall back on that old standby of the book banners — the claim that school libraries and classrooms have been…
BY HANK REICHMAN A Texas school superintendent has now apologized after one of his top officials advised teachers that, if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom library, they should give students access to a book from an “opposing” perspective. Nevertheless, the assault on classroom and school libraries in Texas and elsewhere,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday AAUP President Irene Mulvey issued a statement condemning President Trump’s attack on critical race theory as “a naked attempt to politicize our national reckoning with racism and a new escalation in the assault on expert knowledge.” This was not, however, Trump’s only such attempt. Less than 48 hours after tweeting that…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Mary Grabar, a fellow at the right-wing Alexander Hamilton Institute, has written an essay praising Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) for introducing the Saving American History Act of 2020, “a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts.” This is…
BY HANK REICHMAN No sooner had I posted my COVID-19 and Higher Education annotated reading list, than two pieces appeared that also deserve attention. The first is by Sara Goldrick-Rab, Professor of sociology and medicine at Temple University. Her book, Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, is…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On Friday, op-ed columnist David Brooks of the New York Times published one of his classic tone-deaf attempts to offer big thoughts on our times: “The Age Of Coddling Is Over.” The headline was absolutely right. Not because the coronavirus has suddenly made us all realize the virtues of hardship, but…
BY STEVEN LUBET It was inevitable that the film “Remember the Titans” would be mentioned in the headlines of Herman Boone’s obituaries. He was the real-life African American football coach of a real-life integrated high school team in Alexandria, Virginia, that won the real-life 1971 state championship, and he passed away last month at age…