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,…
BY HANK REICHMAN For some time now, despite the rash of school shootings and the growing number of accidental shootings associated with the unfettered dissemination of firearms, violent crime in most urban areas in the U.S. has been declining for decades. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, after peaking in 1991, “crime…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week Hungarian universities received 24 hours from the Ministry of Human Capacities and the Ministry of Justice to comment on a proposed amendment, which declares that gender studies courses may no longer be offered in Hungary, the Hungarian economic and political weekly Heti Világgazdaság (HVG.hu) reported yesterday. According to a report…
BY AARON BARLOW From a novel called The Spiral Road by Jan de Hartog, I learned that a physician’s diagnosis doesn’t depend as much on knowledge of medicine as it does on knowledge of the patient. I was a high-school student at the time and on a de Hartog kick–but I’ve never forgotten that lesson and still…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Almost lost in all of the attention to the special congressional election in Ohio’s 12th district has been a major push-back against the Right’s attacks on union rights. Voters in Missouri repealed, by an overwhelmingly majority in a referendum, the right-to-work statute that had been passed by the GOP dominated legislature.…
In our new book — How to Run a College: A Practical Guide for Trustees, Faculty, Staff and Policymakers — Dr. Joey King and I argue that governance is the worst problem affecting American higher education. Most Trustees Unschooled About Institutional Issues Most trustees are notoriously unschooled about the issues that affect their institutions. They…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN At the AAUP’s annual conference in June Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University and author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, was the plenary luncheon speaker. Chapter 7 of her book was published separately…