POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Jay Bhattacharya, appointed by President Trump to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH), first gained national notoriety as a principal author of the so-called Great Barrington Declaration of 2020, which condemned the NIH for ignoring calls to mostly cease pandemic-related precautions. Now over 300 NIH staff have published the Bethesda…
BY HANK REICHMAN On May 25, the Black Flag Action Group, formed by scholars at Israeli colleges and universities, issued an important Urgent Call to Action demanding the heads of Israeli academic institutions “speak out” and “act immediately” to stop the war on Gaza. By May 31 the Call had collected over 1,400 signatures. As…
BY JONATHAN REES I’m borrowing the title for this post from a Lewis Black rant on the Daily Show, but it’s this news from the New York Times that should give us all more reason to be unrelentingly hostile to AI: OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has a plan to overhaul college education—by embedding its…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY Recently my public university system in Georgia announced that all syllabi in our 25-school system would be made public through a searchable database. This fall “core” classes and those in the college of education will have syllabi public and others phased in after that. Georgia is not the first state to mandate…
BY JONATHAN REES This post is about the biggest threat to the jobs of college professors in America today. No, not that guy. Not the guy with the chain saw either. I’m writing about that other subject that you’re sick of reading about because it just makes you depressed. I first wrote about AI for…
BY CONCERNED FACULTY AT COLUMBIA, BARNARD, AND TEACHERS COLLEGE We are publishing this letter at the request of several AAUP members from Columbia, Barnard, and Teachers College. The letter was drafted on May 13, 2025, in response to recent events on their campuses. We, a group of faculty members from Columbia University, Barnard College, and…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement was issued yesterday in response to a decision earlier that day by the Department of Homeland Security to revoke Harvard University’s certification in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, effectively removing over seven thousand students from campus. In a press release DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said the administration…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Last week the American Constitution Society hosted a video conversation on academic freedom with Andrew Manuel Crespo, the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law and Executive Faculty Director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration at Harvard University. Professor Crespo is an AAUP member who is serving as general counsel…
BY ZOE SHERMAN I tried not to be a professional academic. But I loved being a student so much, and I felt such a strong pull toward scholarship that eventually I overcame my qualms about getting my livelihood tangled up with my intellectual passions. In the fall of 2009, at the age of thirty, with…
BY MICHAEL FERGUSON Following is the editor’s introduction to the spring 2025 issue of Academe, “Trump 2.0,” out this week. The full issue and table of contents can be found here. Patricia McGuire, in her contribution to the online edition of this issue, succinctly describes the stakes of the second Trump administration’s intertwined attacks on higher education…