Admissions Scandal Round 2: UCLA Needs A Broader Investigation into Cash-for-Admission

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.  To read his previous post on the cash-for-admission scandals see Bleeding Meritocracy: Responding to the Admissions Scandal as Outrage Fades. The admissions scandal…

The Barghouti Ban

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…

The Aftermath of Janus v. AFSCME

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…

The End of Forced Arbitration at Purdue Global

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…

Charges Dropped Against L.A. Faculty Activist

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…