BY HANK REICHMAN The situation at the University of California at Santa Cruz has escalated. On Friday the university administration announced that 54 graduate students who are withholding fall grades were fired from their spring appointments. This number may in fact be as high as 80, as some students did not get dismissal letters but…
BY JOHN K. WILSON This week, Arizona HB 2238 passed the state house education committee by a vote of 7-4. Stanley Kurtz (the mastermind behind these laws with the help of the Goldwater Institute) calls the Arizona bill the start of a “third wave” of legislation in the name of campus free speech, following earlier…
BY 36 COMMUNITY COLLEGE SUPPORTERS In December 2017, as the Connecticut State Colleges & Universities (CSCU) system office was preparing its “Students First” consolidation plan, the system’s Faculty Advisory Committee (FAC) presented an extended critique of the proposal. It was not supportive, recommended other paths, and contained the following warning: “We believe that there is…
BY JOEL BERKOWITZ We thought the process would be straightforward. As it turns out, things got twisted. More than once. It all started with a simple invitation. As president of my campus’s chapter of the AAUP, I invited Joerg Tiede, senior program officer and researcher for the national organization, to come to campus to give a presentation of…
BY TERRY CARTER High-quality academic scholarship often goes unpublished due to lack of space and increased competition for peer-reviewed and other traditional print publications. Would clear and highly visible higher education guidelines encourage institutions to accept digital scholarship? I argued for such guidelines in a presentation entitled “Academic Freedom in the Digital Technology Age: Exploring…
BY HANK REICHMAN The right-wing’s embrace of campus free speech has always seemed, well, more than a little hypocritical. The outrage machine kicks into high gear when invited speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro, or Charles Murray are protested or disinvited. But what about when the speaker is someone these vocal free speech…
BY JAMES FERRY Academe editor Michael Ferguson reached out to me. He recalled that one of my gigs was teaching at a local prison, and he wanted to know if I’d be interested in writing an article about my experiences. I leaped at the chance since graduate students don’t often get pitched on publishing opportunities.…
BY JENNIFER BRIER AND JORDAN “JT” TURNER Despite decades of activism and change, LGBTQ college students continue to face challenges that affect their experiences with higher education. Some are similar to what straight and cis students confront on a daily basis—economic struggles that make paying for school a significant hardship or mental health issues that…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN In December graduate student employees at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) began a wildcat grading strike, refusing to submit fall quarter grades until they get a salary increase. The university administration said that as many as 12,000 students had their grades withheld. Today the strike expanded as student…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a statement in support of the union representing non-tenure-track faculty members, or lecturers, in the University of California issued today by the Berkeley Faculty Association (BFA), which includes tenured and tenure-track professors (so-called “senate faculty”) at the University of California, Berkeley. BFA is affiliated with…