BY HANK REICHMAN A group of 177 Stanford University professors from more than 40 departments, most in the physical and natural sciences, today made public a September 8 letter they sent to US Attorney General Merrick Garland calling for an end to a Trump administration program that sought to uncover alleged Chinese spies in American…
BY HANNAH JOHNSTON, M. SIX SILBERMAN, AND JAMIE WOODCOCK Dana Barr put the kids to bed, opened the computer, and logged in to Amazon Mechanical Turk to look for work. After about a minute, Dana saw a task from Albaventura University Cogsci. “Ten minute survey about political beliefs, $1.00.” Six dollars an hour—not the best…
BY HANK REICHMAN In November 2017 the AAUP released a report on National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom, which decried “increasing restrictions on and threats to the global exchange of scientific research and the academic freedom of American scientists to interact with foreign colleagues,” especially those from China. In 2019, the AAUP…
BY J. MOUFAWAD-PAUL Alain Badiou once remarked that philosophy was “democratic” insofar as anyone is capable of critical thinking, but “undemocratic” because the pursuit of truth is not the same as voting according to one’s subjective opinion. In my opinion, this position is the basis for critical thinking and critical scholarship––anyone is capable of critical…
BY HANK REICHMAN Stephen F. Cohen, one of the world’s leading scholars of Soviet and post-Soviet history and politics and emeritus professor at Princeton and New York Universities, died of lung cancer on Friday at the age of 81. The author of ten books and numerous scholarly articles, Cohen was also a prominent public intellectual…
BY HANS-JOERG TIEDE The AAUP released today a new research report, Policies on Academic Freedom, Dismissal for Cause, Financial Exigency, and Program Discontinuance, that examines the prevalence of AAUP-supported policies in faculty handbooks and collective bargaining agreements at four-year institutions that have a tenure system. The analysis replicates a study conducted in 2000 and tracks changes that…
BY MARTIN KICH The publication of a new biography of the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, written by his now elderly “step-sister,” Annye Anderson, with the assistance of Preston Lauterbach. As with just about everything else associated with Johnson, his blood relation to Annye Anderson is actually not quite…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Science magazine reports the following: Seventy-seven U.S. scientists who have won a Nobel Prize [on May 21] asked Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services, to “act urgently” to review a controversial NIH decision to terminate a grant that supported…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH These statements on COVID-19’s impact on the publishing industry have been issued to mark the 26th annual World Book and Copyright Day on April 23. An Industry ‘Already Struggling for Oxygen’ We, the undersigned representatives of the global book industry urge governments all over the world to recognize, support and celebrate…
BY JUAN COLE Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan and editor-in-chief of the Informed Comment blog, from which this is reposted with permission. The surgeon general, Jerome Adams, has announced that the coming week will see enormous numbers of coronavirus deaths and hospitalizations, calling it this…