BY HANK REICHMAN Recently I was asked by a publication with an audience of college and university administrators what advice I might have about how to respond to attacks on faculty members’ extramural expression. I said this: “No matter how controversial the faculty member’s alleged expression may be, do not apologize for it or formally…
POSTED BY THE AAUP Increasingly violent clashes between student protesters and police at universities in Hong Kong raise grave concerns for the American Association of University Professors. On November 17, police laid siege to the campus of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where they employed tear gas, rubber bullets, and water cannons against students, journalists, and…
BY AARON BARLOW Another professor, this time an Eric Rasmusen who teaches business and economics at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, is being raked over the coals for a Tweet. This one was particularly stupid (in my view—and certainly for a teacher with classroom responsibilities for a diverse body of students). Rasmusen is…
BY AARON BARLOW A commenter who signs herself “RAB” posted, in response to my own last post, about something that has been gnawing at me for a long time, the lack of “presence” of faculty in student lives. I had never used that particular word as i worked over what we both see happening, but…
BY AARON BARLOW Students are treated differently dependent on race and class and disability and sex. That’s a truism, something educators have known for at least half a century. But it’s also a truism we’ve still failed to address effectively. Why? In part because of the way students treat us but mostly because we don’t…
BY THE COMMITTEE ON COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY GOVERNANCE On November 1, following the announcement of current University of Wisconsin system president Ray Cross’s retirement, the president of the Board of Regents of the UW system appointed a nine-member presidential search committee. Breaking decades of institutional precedent, he did not include any faculty members on the…
BY AARON BARLOW “You know what? I have the right to speak. I have freedom of speech just as other people do, but they’ve taken away the Republicans rights,” That, in a nutshell, is what is often presented as the modern conception of the right of discussion in the public sphere and who it applies…
BY AARON BARLOW At one point in North by Northwest, Leo G. Carroll’s character The Professor says “It’s so horribly sad. Why is it I feel like laughing?” Of course, he isn’t really a professor but is an intelligence agent. But this professor had exactly that reaction this morning on reading in The Guardian about…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday I posted a piece about the outsourcing of work in the University of California (UC) and a pending strike by members of AFSCME, the union representing many staff employees at the university. But UC Berkeley sociology professor Michael Burawoy has reminded me (and others) that UC’s non-tenure-track lecturers, represented by the…
BY HANK REICHMAN On October 30 I had the great honor and privilege of delivering the 29th annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Academic Freedom Lecture at the University of Michigan. In 1954 the University of Michigan suspended and then terminated Professors H. Chandler Davis and Mark Nickerson, a tenured faculty member, and suspended but then reinstated…