BY JOHN K. WILSON Steven Thrasher, a student graduation speaker who received his Ph.D. from New York University last week, sparked enormous controversy with his speech. Thrasher expressed support for “the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the Apartheid State Government in Israel” and declared, “We must stand together to vanquish racism and Islamophobia…
BY JOHN T. MCNAY The growing obsession on the part of college and university administrations with secrecy, which I address in my recent Academe article, “Ohio AAUP Chapters Contend with Secretive Searches,” is indicative of a larger issue. The continual adoption of corporate models is undermining the academic mission at our institutions. Even corporations, when…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The Mississippi Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning debated proper salad preparation techniques on May 16. That’s because they spent two hours discussing whether James M. Thomas should be granted tenure despite his criticism of Republican legislators. Ultimately, Thomas was allowed to receive tenure (with an untold number…
BY JANE M. FRASER This blog post is based on a speech the author made at a retirement celebration for her on April 30. Some people are unprincipled. I don’t mean that in the usual sense of that word. I simply mean that they don’t use principles in decision making. They don’t think about which…
BY HANK REICHMAN In Fall 2017 the California Faculty Association (CFA), an AAUP-affiliated union representing nearly 28,000 California State University (CSU) faculty, librarians, counselors, and coaches, and CSU management agreed to extend their collective bargaining agreement. As part of that agreement, the sides agreed to continue negotiations over academic freedom and intellectual property with the…
BY HANK REICHMAN The late UC Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr once famously quipped that “the three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty.” Only the last of these, he suggested, presented a problem. Another related saying attributed to him was his description…
BY HANK REICHMAN At their spring meeting May 10, the 22 members of the Board of Governors of the Faculty Association of the California Community Colleges (FACCC) took a unanimous vote of no confidence in the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. It was only the second such vote in the organization’s 66-year history, the last…
BY JOHN K. WILSON One of the strongest arguments for free speech and against allowing speakers to be shouted down speakers was made on May 5, 2019 by a group of 15 white supremacist Holocaust deniers in Russellville, Arkansas. Billy Roper, who runs the racist ShieldWall Network, led the group who disrupted a March of…
BY EVA SWIDLER Although the media frenzy is already fading, public attention this spring was recently focused yet again in deeply unflattering ways on higher education as admissions scandals rocked elite universities in the US. Predictably, observers noted that, problematic though it might be to nakedly buy one’s way into competitive institutions with cash payments,…
BY STEVEN VICKERS Twenty visits to a doctor, thirty-two tests or screenings, six doctors, and countless pills: this is my new reality. In the summer of 2018, I began feeling flushed and nauseated. I would wake at 3am and run to the toilet to empty the contents of my stomach. I would go purchase diapers…