BY MONICA OWENS Privatization of online higher education is on the rise. For-profit online education corporations like Academic Partnerships, Kaplan, Wiley, Pearson, and Blackboard contract with public and private nonprofit institutions to provide digital platforms for educational content, recruit students, manage enrollment, facilitate the development of course materials, and more. While the use of digital…
BY HANK REICHMAN This afternoon I had the pleasure of joining a demonstration of University of California librarians and their supporters outside the Berkeley campus’s Doe Library where the latest bargaining session between the UC-AFT Librarians and the UC administration was taking place. As I previously reported, academic freedom is a central topic of negotiation. …
BY HANK REICHMAN In a victory for academic freedom, U.S. student Lara Alqasem, who is of Palestinian descent, will be allowed to enter Israel to study at Hebrew University after the country’s Supreme Court today accepted her appeal of the decision to prevent her entry. Alqasem, whom the government claimed was a BDS activist based…
BY ED BURMILA The following is reposted with permission from The Outline. Ed Burmila is assistant professor of political science at Bradley University. The 2014 right-wing fever dream of a film God’s Not Dead, a fantasy version of higher education for young adults raised on the Left Behind series, is a comic masterpiece, at least…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD Christopher Newfield is professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This is reposted from the Remaking the University blog. The biggest mainstream media higher ed story last week–and this–has been the lawsuit charging Harvard with discrimination against Asian American applicants. My piece on it has been delayed by…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL There are wide variations in the levels of financial support that alumni offer to their alma maters. While alumni giving rates at a few select colleges and universities may approach 60% of the identifiable alumni, most institutions have substantially lower levels. It’s a persistent source of discussion in budget conversations on…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Today the writers’ organization PEN America, represented by the nonpartisan nonprofit Protect Democracy and the Yale Law School Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against President Donald Trump. The suit seeks to stop President Trump from using…
BY SIMON MALOY The following review of Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can Win the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA and creator of the notorious Professor Watchlist, is reposted with permission from Media Matters. Simon Maloy is a senior writer at Media Matters. Formerly a political writer…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN A group of 120 academics and human rights activists of Iranian origin have called on Iran to free imprisoned Princeton University graduate student Xiyue Wang, who was arrested in Tehran by agents of Iran’s Intelligence Ministry in 2016 while he was conducting archival research and sentenced to ten years in prison…
BY THE UNIVERSITY OF LA VERNE FACULTY POLICIES COMMITTEE At a time when tenure is under attack in the American academy, it is heartening to be able to offer some good news. By a message sent on October 10, 2018, Devorah Lieberman, President of the University of La Verne, announced that, “The Board of Trustees,…