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…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this month the AAUP released an important statement, In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education, prepared by Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The statement has now been endorsed by these organizations: American Federation of Teachers American Historical Association Association of American Colleges and Universities American Society of Journalists and…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY It’s Campus Equity Week, a week of action from October 21 to 25 when faculty, students, and other advocates on campuses around the country are calling attention to the increasingly precarious nature of academic employment and its negative implications for higher education. Guest blogger Carolyn Betensky focuses here on obstacles to research…
BY AARON BARLOW “She may have, and would have been right.” This cavalier dismissal points directly to the corruption at the heart of contemporary academia. It’s a response from MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte to an inquiry from New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo concerning a warning from scholar and entrepreneur Sarah Szalavitz about…
BY HANK REICHMAN In The Future of Academic Freedom I devote a chapter to the baleful influence on academic freedom of colleges’ and universities’ increasing reliance on external donors, many of whom act on political motivations potentially detrimental to institutional values. Some of the possible pitfalls may be seen in how the Massachusetts Institute of…
BY HANK REICHMAN In April I posted to this blog an item, “‘Professor Watchlist’ Goes International,” which reported, among other things, that a member of parliament from right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s party had called on students to send her videos of instructors “indoctrinating” them into leftist ideologies and that Bolsonaro himself shared one such…
BY HENNING SCHROEDER Woody Allen got it right, years before leadership seminars became the latest craze in higher education. In the 1971 movie Bananas his character Fielding Mellish goes on a rant after he gets dumped by his girlfriend, “Can you believe that? She says I’m not leader enough for her—who is she looking for,…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the face of an avalanche of criticism, Stanford University provost Persis Drell has stepped back from a plan revealed last week to end university financial support for the highly esteemed Stanford University Press. But the reprieve may just be temporary, as Drell agreed only to provide funds for one year. The…
BY HANK REICHMAN Scholars in the humanities and social sciences are painfully familiar with the widespread and baneful trend of converting teaching positions into contingent non-tenure-track, often part-time, “adjunct” jobs. But some may not realize that a similar trend on the research side, especially in the physical and natural sciences, has emerged through the abuse…