POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The announcement this week that the University of Akron will eliminate 19 percent of its degree programs, has received considerable national publicity (see here and here). The following is the text of a statement responding to the cuts issued jointly by the Akron AAUP and the executive committee of the university’s…
This past weekend, I was invited by the National Association of Scholars to speak on a panel at their conference at Grove City College, “Capitol Ideas: Government Overreach and Higher Education.” As a progressive, I probably agreed with the title about fearing government overreach in higher education more than almost anyone there, and I spoke…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Like many academics, I am a devotee of crime fiction, especially of the noirish and hard-boiled varieties. On a plane trip earlier this summer I was enjoying a collection of stories, Jewish Noir, edited by Kenneth Wishnia (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), when one tale leaped out as unique. “Living Underwater,”…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL One of the most interesting responsibilities as a college president is to serve as a member of the president-led athletic conferences. With experience as a chair of conferences at the Division I and Division III levels, I can report that there are some striking differences between the divisions. But what stands…
ДBY HANK REICHMAN A new survey of 63,000 scientific experts across 16 federal agencies, conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in cooperation with the Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology at Iowa State University, shows that the Trump administration continues to “sideline science.” According to the survey, government scientists report iissues including “censorship…
BY HANK REICHMAN Librarians in the University of California system are represented by the American Federation of Teachers. They are currently engaged in bargaining a new contract. In the course of that process the UC-AFT proposed that the following underlined language be added to Article 1, Recognition, in the new contract: The University recognizes librarians…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is from the Tampa Bay Times: The only mental health counselor at Florida Polytechnic University got laid off in June. She suspects she was too loud about the ways the troubled university was, in her eyes, failing its students. Her departure left some 1,400 of them with no on-campus counselor.…
BY HANK REICHMAN “The educational reform landscape is littered with theories about what’s needed to improve low-performing schools. The Finnish model. The South Korean model. More money with more restrictions. More money with fewer restrictions. The answers are seldom so simple.” Those wise words come from a January 2017 Los Angeles Times editorial responding to…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The other day I posted an item reporting efforts by the government of Hungary to ban programs in gender studies. Yesterday the following letter was sent to Jozsef Bodis, Hungarian Minister of Education: Minister of Education Hungary jozsef.bodis@emmi.gov.hu Dear Minister of Education, We write to protest the Hungarian government’s proposed law…
BY HANK REICHMAN Charlie Kirk is the twenty-something founder of the right-wing “student group” Turning Point USA, sponsor of the notorious Professor Watchlist. Kirk’s group is so nutso that even the Charles Koch Foundation and the Young America’s Foundation have turned against it. Sarah Ruger, director of Free Speech Initiatives for the Charles Koch Institute,…