BY HANK REICHMAN Ontario Conservative Premier Doug Ford has warned the province’s public universities and colleges they will face funding cuts if they fail to adopt free-speech policies that defend controversial speakers on campus. The government announced yesterday that it will give schools four months to design, implement and enforce wide-ranging free-speech policies. Ford had promised…
BY HANK REICHMAN On Tuesday of this week the national AAUP delivered a letter to the leaders of the Rutgers University AAUP-AFT chapter expressing concern that any discipline stemming from a report by that university’s Office of Employment Equity, which concluded that history professor James Livingston’s Facebook posts on gentrification “were not protected by the…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On Friday, September 28 the AAUP Foundation and the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges Education Institute (FACCC EI) are sponsoring a day-long conference on academic freedom at Berkeley City College in downtown Berkeley, California. UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky will deliver the keynote address on “Free Speech on Campus.”…
BY MICHAEL C. BEHRENT Last year, North Carolina became one of the first states to adopt a so-called “campus free speech” law (S.L. 2017-196). This law, like similar legislation that has been proposed or approved in other states, was drafted by a partisan conservative think-tank and supported by sympathetic legislators. Premised on the dubious proposition…
BY HANK REICHMAN A well-known feature of American higher education, especially among large privates and public “flagships,” is the regional rivalry, mostly athletics-based. You know, Ohio State-Michigan, Harvard-Yale, Alabama-Auburn, or UCLA-USC. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area there’s Cal-Stanford (for anyone who may not be aware, Cal — short for California — is the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday, August 28, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) released the results of extensive surveys of 501 business executives at private sector and nonprofit organizations and another of 500 hiring managers, which revealed that both groups “express a higher degree of confidence in colleges and universities than does the American…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the wake of the AAUP’s recent disclosure that Purdue University Global — the totally online entity created when Purdue, ignoring protests by faculty and community leaders, acquired for-profit Kaplan University (see my previous post here)— is requiring its instructional faculty to accept a restrictive non-disclosure agreement, the Century Foundation,a progressive, nonpartisan…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a letter sent by AAUP Associate Secretary Hans-Joerg Tiede to professors Deepa Kumar and David Hughes, President and Vice-President of the Rutgers University AAUP-AFT. The letter is followed by a statement issued by the AAUP-AFT Rutgers Executive Council. For additional background on this case see…
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The following is reposted with permission from the Remaking the University blog. Michael Meranze is Professor of History at UCLA and a member of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. For previous posts on this topic go here and here. As part of their negotiations with the university, University of…
BY HANK REICHMAN “Union Maid,” written in 1940 by the great folk singer Woody Guthrie, is one of the classic anthems of the American labor movement. Pete Seeger, who would help make the song famous as a member of the Almanac Singers, wrote of its creation: I’m proud to say I was present when ‘Union…