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 The tendency of right-wing “free speech warriors” to apply one standard to speech they agree with and vow to defend, and another less liberal standard to speech they don’t like is well-documented, even old news. In April John Wilson reported here how even as Republicans rallied behind President Trump’s phony executive order…
BY HANK REICHMAN The AAUP has joined with 18 21 other organizations in a statement released today by PEN America in response to reports that the FBI has urged universities to develop protocols for monitoring students and scholars from Chinese state-affiliated research institutions. The full statement and list of signatories may be found here and…
BY HANK REICHMAN Discussing targeted online harassment of faculty members in The Future of Academic Freedom, I wrote: It’s not only faculty; students too may become targets. For example, “after American University elected the first African-American woman to lead its student body, the white supremacist leader who founded one of the largest hate sites on…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the waning months of his term as California governor Jerry Brown embraced a new pet project: a totally online community college. With the enthusiastic support of California Community College Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley, Brown got the Legislature to somewhat reluctantly agree to spend an initial $100 million to get the online…
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…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Today, August 7, marks the third anniversary of the detention in Iran of Princeton University graduate student Xiyue Wang. Wang, a Chinese-born naturalized U.S.citizen who previously worked as a translator in Central Asia, was conducting doctoral research on Iran’s Qajar dynasty that ruled from 1785 to 1925 when he was arrested…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH A post I wrote on the massacre in El Paso was removed from the blog because it did not have anything specific to do with higher education. And at a certain level, that decision was justifiable because the blog is about topics and issues related to higher education, and it is…
BY AARON BARLOW Yale is not college. What goes on there has little relevance to life on the majority of American campuses. Pundits across the country who write on education need to put this on little notecards and place them by their bedsides so that they can read them when they wake each morning. That…
BY JONATHAN REES Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo and a member of the AAUP Council. The following is reposted from his “More or Less Bunk” blog. This morning [August 1], I delivered this paper in the Academic Freedom session at the West Coast Division of the American Historical…