POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Here are excerpts from two articles written by Becky Johnson for the Smoky Mountain News [http://www.smokymountainnews.com/], passed on to me by Connor Gibson of UnKoch My Campus: WCU Faculty Closely Monitoring $2 Million Koch Gift Faculty members have lauded administration for giving them a seat at the table. That wouldn’t happen…
BY ALVIN BURSTEIN Guest blogger Alvin Burstein is professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and past president of the Louisiana AAUP conference. For many academics, members or not of the AAUP, the need to protect academic freedom and tenure is a rallying cry, and the organization has been stalwart in defending both. However, the…
BY DAVID J. WEERTS Guest blogger David J. Weerts is associate professor and faculty director of the jCENTER for Innovative Higher Education at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. His research focuses on state-university relations, community-university engagement, and alumni giving, volunteerism, and advocacy. For those interested in the politics of higher education, the ongoing sparring in…
BY JOYCE MILAMBILING Guest blogger Joyce Milambiling is professor and coordinator of the TESOL/applied linguistics graduate program in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Northern Iowa. Applications for sabbaticals at my university are due next month. The process is competitive, the number of paid leaves for one or two semesters is limited,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for AlterNet, Alex Kotch explains in great detail “Charles Koch’s Six-Step Guide to Founding a Free-Market Center at Your University.” The article is based on recordings made at a Koch-sponsored conference. Here is a substantial portion of the introductory section of Kotch’s article: “Since 1980, the family foundations of billionaire…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This item appeared in the HuffPost Hill daily newsletter for September 8, 2016: WHAT YOUR REPUBLICAN UNCLE WILL BE EMAILING YOU IN A WEEK OR SO–Seth Borenstein: “It’s no Nobel Peace Prize, but Barack Obama has a new honor to brag about. Scientists have named a parasite after him—and there’s no worming…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This post originally appeared on the blog Talking Union [https://talkingunion.wordpress.com/]. Paul Garver, the editor of that blog, on which some of my labor-related posts to this blog have been re-posted, has asked that I disseminate it as widely as possible. As the note at the bottom makes clear, it had already…
BY AARON BARLOW When I first heard the term “Digital Humanities” a decade ago, it seemed like something brewed up for use by those who want to poison the humanities—still does. It appeared to be nothing more than something developed by those with a little knowledge of C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures and the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Advocates of academic freedom generally find freedom of information laws beneficial. Such laws enhance public knowledge and debate on the workings of government agencies, including public universities. But as a 2013 amicus brief filed by the AAUP and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) pointed out, “in evaluating disclosure under FOIA, the public’s right to know…