POSTED BY MARTIN KICH What follows are the introduction and the first section of the most recent higher education report produced by the Ohio Conference of AAUP. John McNay, the President of the Conference, and Sara Kilpatrick, the Executive Director of the Conference, deserves kudos for doing the bulk of the work on this report.…
BY HANK REICHMAN On April 27, Queen Elizabeth II formally assented to the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, approved by Britain’s Conservative Parliament earlier in the year. The act accelerated the privatization of Britain’s higher education system, a process begun decades earlier and which in key respects mirrors American developments. The following comments on…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Three months ago, I attacked a bill in the Tennessee legislature, the “Tennessee Freedom of Speech on College Campus Bill,” and wrote that it was “a disaster for everyone. It imposes bizarre and burdensome regulations that administrators will struggle to understand and implement. It takes away from professors the ability…
BY KENNETH S. STERN AND ERNST BENJAMIN This is a guest post by Kenneth S. Stern and Ernst Benjamin. Kenneth S. Stern is the Executive Director of the Justus & Karin Rosenberg Foundation, and a Fellow of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College (where he has taught a course on antisemitism as a Visiting…
BY HANK REICHMAN In January, the Reclaim California Higher Education Coalition issued a report, The $48 Fix, which demonstrated that California could provide today’s students with the same accessible low-cost university experience that California successfully offered its students from the 1960s through the 1990s through an income surtax of no more than $48/year for the…
BY MARTIN KICH The Wall Street Journal, of all places, has posted a video showing how little the Department of Defense can purchase if all of the federal funding for arts programs is eliminated, as President Trump has proposed. The video is illuminating and suggests a great deal not only about our national priorities but…
BY MARTIN KICH Here is another item to put in the folder of false assertions about how Federal tax policy screws the wealthy and exists to provide giveaways to the impoverished. In reporting on an Issue Brief produced by the Pew Research Center, the Hechinger Report highlights the widening gap between the value of Federal…
Shortly after the 2016 election, the AAUP warned that we could be facing the greatest threat to academic freedom since the McCarthy period. It now appears that such a warning was not misplaced. Extremists in the administration, Congress, and several state houses have created an atmosphere in which “alternative facts” reign supreme, and which encourages the introduction of legislation that threatens the core principles of our democracy.
BY JOHN K. WILSON The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has issued a tentative set of recommendation for amendments to the Higher Education Act. While claiming to offer “freedom from overregulation,” in reality the NAS proposals would impose the most restrictive, intrusive, and repressive regulations on higher education in American history. The vast number of…
