BY HANK REICHMAN Today I attended one of the over 275 “Tesla Takedown” demonstrations outside of DOGE Dictator Elon Musk’s dealerships nationwide. This one was on Fourth Street in Berkeley, California, where at its height I would estimate some 800-1000 people gathered to voice our outrage at the ongoing Republican coup. It was a spirited…
BY REBECCA DOLHINOW AND DAVID SCHULTZ Rebecca Dolhinow of California State University, Fullerton, and David Schultz of Hamline University seek chapter proposals for an edited book anthology tentatively entitled Trumpism and the Corporate University. Trumpism and the Corporate University will be an edited volume that examines the rise of the corporate university over the last…
BY AUDREY BERLOWITZ The inexplicable budget cuts my financially-solvent university enacted through its 2023–24 APR process both portended and was practice for our current moment. The “headwinds,” justifications for why the university had to cut twenty programs before new system-wide performance-based metrics formally went into effect, have unsurprisingly arrived. If anyone working inside the university…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY Here in Georgia in the last few days: Lawmakers failed to pass a bill to end DEI in student activities and programs in our public university system. The bill would have codified into law policy moves already done to erase DEI in the last year by our system administration. One of our…
BY HANK REICHMAN I subscribe to Don Moynihan’s substack, “Can We Still Govern.” Moynihan is Professor of Public Policy at the Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan. His posts are a terrific guide to how best to understand the administrative impact of the Musk-Trump assault on governance, as well as other related topics…
BY HISTORIANS FOR PEACE AND DEMOCRACY This statement was issued by the steering committee of Historians for Peace and Democracy on January 31, 2025, and sent to its membership. “Who controls the present controls the past,” wrote George Orwell in 1949. Authoritarian regimes have long tried to rewrite history to advance their political objectives. The…
BY JENNIFER RUTH Yesterday, the Department of Education announced investigations into Columbia University, Northwestern University, Portland State University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, explaining that “widespread antisemitic harassment has been reported” at these five institutions. Given the confusion that reigns in and over higher education today, it’s worth trying…
BY DAVID MOSHMAN On January 6, at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), members voted 428 to 88 in support of a “Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza.” The resolution noted that Israel has killed hundreds of teachers and professors and has destroyed eighty percent of Gaza’s schools, all its university campuses,…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH Please consider signing this open letter to the NYU administration. The text is below. Click the preceding link to access the form itself so you can add your name. On December 12, the NYU administration invited the NYPD to arrest two faculty members who were supporting students involved in a nonviolent protest…
BY JEFFREY C. ISAAC This week Donald Trump held a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, promoting the themes of “Make America Great Again,” “America First,” and, of course, “The Greatness of Trump.” According to a New York Times headline, it was “A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny, and Racism.” Stephen…