BY HANK REICHMAN Be forewarned! This post is an act of shameless self-promotion. That’s because it announces that today, April 2, is the official publication date of my new book The Future of Academic Freedom. Consisting of ten interlinked essays–the publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, calls them “audacious”–the book “aims to bring to discussions of…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today was a big day for University of California librarians. Regular readers of this blog will be aware that the system’s librarians have been negotiating a new contract and that one of the contentious issues was academic freedom, which UC negotiators initially claimed did not apply to librarians. (For previous coverage see…
BY HANK REICHMAN You may recall the case of Courtney Lawton, a part-time lecturer and doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who in August 2017 received threats after a video recording of her participation in a demonstration protesting an on-campus recruitment table for Turning Point USA was disseminated on the internet. The university suspended…
BY LEO WELCH Leo Welch is the Vice President of the Illinois AAUP. The anti-union right-wing Republicans finally got a U.S. Supreme Court decision that they predicted would destroy unions once and for all. The Janus decision was preceded by two other attempts which included Abood v. Detroit Board of Education which held that union…
BY JASON ELIAS Faculty members at the University of New Mexico have been talking to their colleagues for the past two years about the possibility of organizing a union to strengthen their voice on campus. A clear majority of the 1,600 faculty members support this move, and the United Academics of the University of New…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD The following is reposted with permission from the Remaking the University blog. Christopher Newfield is professor of literature and American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. As it enters week 3, the promising new series Operation Varsity Blues is running out of gas. The story of wealthy white folks…
BY SHANNON DEA Shannon Dea is associate professor of philosophy and vice-president of the faculty association at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The following is re-posted with permission from University Affairs/Affaires Universitaires (universityaffairs.ca). Last month I had the privilege and honor of participating in and speaking at the triennial Harry Crowe Conference, sponsored by…
BY BETHANY LETIECQ, BETSY DEMULDER, AND TIM GIBSON On August 24, 2018, George Mason University (GMU) President Ángel Cabrera floated an idea during our faculty convocation. In order to serve more students, especially those who cannot easily access and afford a brick-and-mortar university experience, such as single mothers, full-time workers, and veterans, he was exploring…
BY JOHN K. WILSON At 4:07pm ET today, Donald Trump signed an Executive Order imposing “free inquiry” on college campuses. In reality, this hypocritical order by an open enemy of free expression is nothing but a political tool that Trump wants to use to silence his ideological opponents. The Executive Order requires public colleges to…
BY AARON BARLOW The City University of New York is quietly floating the idea of consolidating majors across its campuses. Rather than a Physics major at City College, Hunter, Baruch, my own New York City College of Technology and all the rest, students would be funneled into one CUNY campus. This, I suspect, is seen…