BY JOHN K. WILSON The Trump Administration’s decision to ban Omar Barghouti from coming to America is an alarming attack on academic freedom and free speech. Barghouti, a co-founder of the Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) movement, was scheduled to speak at Harvard and New York University but the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) ordered…
BY LEO WELCH Leo Welch is the Vice President of the Illinois AAUP. The anti-union right-wing Republicans finally got a U.S. Supreme Court decision that they predicted would destroy unions once and for all. The Janus decision was preceded by two other attempts which included Abood v. Detroit Board of Education which held that union…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD The following is reposted with permission from the Remaking the University blog. Christopher Newfield is professor of literature and American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. As it enters week 3, the promising new series Operation Varsity Blues is running out of gas. The story of wealthy white folks…
BY DAVE NALBONE Recently, Purdue University Global (PUG) announced that it would abide by federal laws prohibiting the use of forced arbitration to resolve disputes by its students, which until then had been a requirement of its students in order to enroll. This predatory practice dated to PUG’s former iteration, the for-profit and predatory Kaplan…
POSTED BY JOHN K. WILSON Last week University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer wrote a letter, later posted online, to the University of Chicago community about President Trump’s proposed executive action addressing free speech issues on college and university campuses. To: Members of the University Community From: Robert J. Zimmer Subject: Federal Action Regarding Free…
BY DAVE NALBONE AND BILL MULLEN Below is the text of a press release issued by the Indiana chapters of the AAUP on February 25. West Lafayette, IN — Indiana chapters of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) won a major victory for students and faculty in Indiana by forcing the online public university,…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Tinker v. Des Moines, upholding the right of students to wear black armbands in school to protest the Vietnam War. The Tinker case established a standard of “substantial disruption” for punishing K-12 students, and it is a landmark case for student…
BY JOHN K. WILSON I was intrigued by a Facebook post yesterday from the National Association of Scholars which announced, “Want a promotion? Too bad; you’re not a union member, says St. Cloud State.” That’s a shocking claim. Or it would be, except that there’s no evidence that it’s true. The post linked to an…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office agreed to drop all criminal charges against Melina Abdullah, a professor and chair of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles and an activist in the AAUP-affiliated California Faculty Association. Prof. Abdullah, a prominent Black Lives Matter leader, faced charges of assaulting a police…
BY ROBERT E. BIONAZ Robert Bionaz is a retired Chicago State University professor who made the original investigation about plagiarism in the dissertation of then-Chicago State interim provost Angela Henderson, who received a $694,000 settlement from the University of Illinois at Chicago because they revealed that they were examining her dissertation. This is his response…