POSTED BY MARTIN KICH On The Beat with Ari Melber, Michael Eric Dyson just described the White House meeting between Donald Trump and Kanye West as “a blitzkrieg of blathering ignorance.” Whether you agree with him or not, the man sure can turn a memorable phrase.
BY DANIEL WEIMER, DARIN MCGINNIS, DANIEL O’HARE, AND JEFF RUTHERFORD Wheeling Jesuit University is a small, mission-driven university that, due to years of administrative turnover, has consistently been faced with financial challenges. In early 2017, our Board of Trustees hired Dr. Debra Townsley to engineer a “turnaround” at WJU to alleviate our serious long-term debt.…
BY HANK REICHMAN On Monday, the Association of University Heads of Israel sent a strongly-worded letter to Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan warning of damage caused to Israel by the ministry’s decision to bar American student Lara Alqasem from entering the country, the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports. The letter came a day after…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL When you live in cities like Boston and work in higher education, it’s impossible not to feel simultaneously a tremendous sense of history and some trepidation about the future. The broad expanse of the Charles River outside my windows offers a sweeping, encompassing view of wealthy universities with 400-year old traditions,…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD Christopher Newfield is Professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This piece is reposted with permission from the Remaking the University blog. Many people are worried about the damage the Kavanaugh appointment will do to the Supreme Court and to American politics. I’m worried about the new damage…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week three scholars published an article reporting on how they had submitted over twenty fraudulent and purportedly ridiculous nonsense papers to various journals in gender and diversity studies. Seven were accepted, four were published online, and three were in process when the authors “had to take the project public prematurely and…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a press statement released on Friday by the Purdue University chapter of the AAUP. It is followed by the full text of the resolution passed by the chapter. Members of Purdue University’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) passed a resolution at…
BY FRANK VON HIPPEL Like many Americans, I felt distressed about the Trump Administration’s attacks on science and scientists following the 2016 election, especially as those attacks related to critical environmental issues such as climate change and pollution. I participated in the March for Science, but at the same time pondered what I could do…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the sad news arrived of the passing of Bob O’Neil, founder of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Free Expression, former president of the University of Virginia and of the University of Wisconsin system, and prominent First Amendment scholar. Bob served three terms as general counsel of the AAUP and was chair…
BY RESHMI DUTT-BALLERSTADT We find ourselves living in a precarious space and time within our institutions where suddenly there has been a resurgence in appeals to civility codes (that perhaps started with Steven Salaita’s firing from University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, in August 2014 as a result of his tweets). Following the election of Donald…