POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Each year, “Shark Week” marks the persistently popular, binge recycling of the films in the Jaws franchise and several dozen documentaries about how sharks mercilessly hunt seals and other prey. (As if to balance out the carnage inflicted upon the seals, in one documentary a Great White is ambushed and killed…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Huffington Post in late summer of last year, Katherine Brooks reported on the scaling back of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), a project that was begun in 1962 that has led to the publication of six volumes of distinct words and phrases from all corners of the…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Discover, Nathaniel Scharping seems to do a very creditable job explaining “What Stephen Hawking’s Final Paper Says (And Doesn’t Say).” I say “seems to” not because I have any reason whatsoever to question what he writes but because I know relatively little about even basic physics and next to…
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. Now the Trump administration…
BY AARON BARLOW Since the beginning of my academic career, I have intertwined the personal with my objects of study. After tentative moves toward some nonsense dissertation related to literary theory, I chucked it all and wrote on my favorite science-fiction writer. That, as they say, was my ‘defining moment.’ At the time, there was…
GUEST POST BY JULIA K. GRUBER I am a professor and AAUP chapter president at Tennessee Technological University, the institution that has recently been in the news for its collaboration with the glider kit “Zombie truck” producing company Fitzgerald. The situation escalated last week, when four professors (myself included) received a rather threatening letter from…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH I came across an link to an item in the Forsyth County News in Alabama, and the string of adverb phrases in the headline caught my attention: “University of Alabama Searching for Family of Owner of Radio Struck by Meteorite.” The Alabama Museum of Natural History is located on the University…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of an open letter to members of the U.S. Congress co-written by the March for Science and the American Psychological Association and signed by a growing number of scholarly organizations, including the AAUP. To add your signature go to https://www.marchforscience.com/gunviolence To: The Members of Congress Three…
BY THE TENNESSEE TECH UNIVERSITY AAUP CHAPTER The Tennessee Tech University chapter of the AAUP passed the following resolution yesterday about a controversy concerning allegations of research misconduct and conflict of interest. WHEREAS a chief purpose of AAUP has always been the protection of shared governance, which requires academic matters in the university to be…