POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Agents of Change, the documentary film about the late 1960s student rebellions at San Francisco State and Cornell Universities, which led to the establishment of Black Studies programs at both schools, is now available on DVD. The film was shown to enthusiastic audiences at the AAUP’s 2015 and 2016 Summer Institutes.…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Dixie State University (DSU) in Utah, after trying and failing to fire music professor Ken Peterson for the crime of gossip, is now declaring that Peterson, to keep his job, must sign a “Last Chance Agreement” that is one of the most extreme violations of academic freedom and free speech that…
BY HANK REICHMAN President Donald Trump has said many, many moronic things, but his tweet this weekend about the raging wildfires in California must be one of his dumbest. “California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amount of readily available water to be…
POSTED BY RUDY FICHTENBAUM The Rider University AAUP chapter is circulating a petition calling on the Rider board of trustees to stop the university’s proposed sale of Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, to Kaiwen, a Chinese for-profit company with no experience in higher education. The costly negotiations for the deal, which is detrimental…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This item is a news update from the Boston Globe that was distributed today: White people need to stop reinforcing the stereotype that White people are not just stupid but ridiculously so. If I feel that I need to apologize for being White, it is because some people seem almost willfully…
BY RISA LIEBERWITZ AND AARON NISENSON The AAUP joined with the American Council on Education and thirty-five other higher education associations in filing an amicus brief in federal court this week opposing a challenge to race-based admissions at Harvard University. We argue that “a diverse student body is essential to educational objectives of colleges and universities,…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL According to Inside Higher Education’s recent survey of college business officers, only 44 percent of those at private baccalaureate institutions believed that their institutions would be financially stable over the next decade. That means the leaders of these institutions – most of which lack a sizeable endowment – will need to…
BY JOHN K. WILSON I’m disturbed by many of the arguments against the decision by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center to hire as a senior fellow Marc Short, the former White House director of legislative affairs and senior adviser to President Donald Trump. William Hitchcock and Melvyn Leffler, history professors at Virginia, resigned from…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In May 2016, I saved this list of 33 examples of the ridiculous things that Donald Trump had said to that point. I am not sure why I did not post it. I suspect that I felt that it was basically impossible to keep up with the avalanche of statements that,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Euronews, Cristina Abellan Matamoros, Natalia Oelsner, and Marta Rodriguez have reported that a Venezuelan professor’s tweet showing the cracked soles of his shoes and explaining that it will cost him four months wages just to have them repaired has gone viral. The English translation is: “I’m not embarrassed to…