BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this year administrators at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, in Wausau, proposed dropping thirteen majors in the humanities and social sciences–including English, philosophy, history, sociology, and Spanish–while adding or expanding sixteen programs “with high-demand career paths.” The proposal would ostensibly address a $4.5 million deficit over two years. The added or…
BY RACHEL IDA BUFF Who’s a Bully? Civility, Authoritarianism, and Power in the Contemporary Academy For its next volume, scheduled for publication in fall 2019, the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom seeks original, scholarly articles that consider how “bullying” is implicated in conflicts taking place around discourses of civility and academic freedom. How do admonitions of “civility”…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH State support for public higher education—or, more precisely, the decline in such support—remains a persistent and significant issue. It continues to exacerbate the level of debt that students are assuming to get degrees (or often to pursue degrees that they do not manage to complete) and constricting the number of faculty…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This resolution was passed unanimously by the chapter leaders and members attending this year’s annual meeting in the Columbus suburb of Westerville. Whereas the state funding for public higher education has been declining for the last 30 years, Whereas the State Share of Instruction (SSI) accounts for only about 13 percent…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown has stated that he is considering a run for the Democratic nomination in 2020. He has been widely quoted as asserting that if the Democrats want win again in 2020, they need to support working people in a broad variety of ways—most fundamentally by supporting collective bargaining…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH A sub-title for this post might be: Student Debt, DACA, and the Ottoman Defeat at the Gates of Vienna. These items have been culled from Pro Publica’s Capitol Words: Granted, Gohmert and King are not only on the Far Right end of the political spectrum, but even among those at that…
BY HANK REICHMAN Matthew Hedges On Wednesday, during a court session lasting all of five minutes, British scholar Matthew Hedges was sentenced to life in prison for espionage by the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Hedges, a 31-year-old student at Durham University, was arrested May 5 at Dubai airport as he was departing after a two-week…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH (I’d like to forestall objections by Canadians by noting that Charles and Daniel Krauthammer, whose columns are the topic of this post, seem to interested very little in making an argument for the origins of the holiday and much more interested in exploring what its meaning is for Americans.) Daniel Krauthammer,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH On the day before Thanksgiving, the poem featured in the Poem-a-Day newsletter of the Academy of American Poets was Sawako Nakayasu’s prose poem “Deflated Rubber Turkey.” This wonderfully light and yet riddle-like poem is available at: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/deflated-rubber-turkey?utm. Sawako Nakayasu is an Assistant Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. She is…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH When I started to draft this post, I saw the daily newsletter from Reason, which has this teaser: “On Thanksgiving, Be Grateful for Property Rights.” Really? In the current political climate, I doubt that property rights are the rights that most Americans are most concerned about preserving. I’m guessing that freedom…