POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On July 7, the executive committee of the University of Pennsylvania AAUP chapter issued a statement in solidarity with Research Associates and Postdocs United at Penn (RAPUP) which is seeking union recognition in an NLRB election scheduled for July 16-17. In addition, the committee released an open letter to the Penn…
BY ROBERT M. KAPLAN Last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stunned the scientific community by proposing that researchers stop submitting articles to high-impact academic journals and instead publish in government-run outlets. The backlash was swift. Within a day, The Washington Post received more than four thousand comments—most of them scathing. But buried beneath the outrage lies a…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Jay Bhattacharya, appointed by President Trump to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH), first gained national notoriety as a principal author of the so-called Great Barrington Declaration of 2020, which condemned the NIH for ignoring calls to mostly cease pandemic-related precautions. Now over 300 NIH staff have published the Bethesda…
BY HANK REICHMAN The headlines tell the tale: “Trump Policies Push 75% of Scientists to Consider Leaving U.S.;” “More than 1,900 scientists write letter in ‘SOS’ over Trump’s attacks on science.” But it’s less a new story than a continuation of an old one, for the Trump regime’s war on science dates back at least…
BY VERONICA VALENCIA GONZALEZ For decades, universities have served as bastions of knowledge, advancing research and shaping the intellectual foundation of society. Yet, in their pursuit of cost-cutting measures, these same institutions have systematically devalued the very people responsible for that progress: the faculty. The suppression of wages for professors; the erosion of tenure; the…
BY GARY TOTTEN A highlight of my work as a journal editor is the pleasure of helping authors, especially early career researchers and graduate students, interpret conflicting peer review reports and improve their arguments and writing. The important work of academic journals to disseminate cutting-edge research in a timely manner and thus advance their fields…
BY ADRIANNA KEZAR, JOHN W. CURTIS, EMILY KOREN, AND KC CULVER The answer to the question our title poses is not very much—yet. There are serious challenges facing higher education in the United States today, from efforts to restrict teaching “uncomfortable” subjects to new and repeated attacks on tenure and the persistent underfunding of colleges,…
BY DAVID AUDRETSCH, CHRISTIAN FISCH, CHIARA FRANZONI, PAUL MOMTAZ, AND SILVIO VISMARA Academic freedom matters for many reasons. Our new study that is available for free download at SSRN empirically shows that academic freedom can be related to economic growth through more innovation. Examining 157 countries over the 1900–2015 period, the study concludes that academic…
BY HANK REICHMAN “We are deeply concerned that the crisis of the American university–the decline of tenure-track jobs and universities’ eroding commitment to the humanities and social sciences–has created a structural crisis for scholarship.” So write the editors of the Journal of the Early Republic, published by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic…
BY RICHARD P. PHELPS With each public remark a scholar may add to society’s collective working memory or subtract from it. Their addition is the new research they present in a journal article or conference presentation. The subtraction, when it occurs, is typically found in the scholar’s portrayal of previous research on the topic. Editors…