BY ANDREW J. DOUGLAS Reposted from the Morehouse Newsroom with permission from the author. Once upon a time a Morehouse professor tried to unionize the faculty. Walter Chivers, the current namesake of the school’s cafeteria, was a professor of sociology at Morehouse College from 1925 until his retirement in 1968. He was also a labor…
BY SUSAN E. MASON May 11, 2023, marked the end of the federal COVID-19 public health emergency declaration. COVID-19 is not gone, to be sure, but we now have a better understanding of the severity and spread of the virus, how to protect ourselves, and how to protect our students. We were all in the…
BY DONALD A. DOWNS In late August, John Wilson posted a critique of the recently published Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry. I have long respected Wilson’s views on higher education. In this case, however, I find his critiques misplaced. The Principles’ authors had two main objectives: garnering support for the Principles…
BY HANK REICHMAN As higher education reels from continuing assaults on academic freedom, tenure, shared governance and education itself in states like Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, we now face the possibility that another state’s major flagship institution may soon exist only as a shadow of its former self, the victim of a…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last month the New York Times Magazine published an article, “The Instagram Account That Shattered a California High School,” by journalist Dashka Slater. It recounted the troubling tale of a racist Instagram account, created by a California high school student and followed by just thirteen of his fellow students, all white and…
BY HANK REICHMAN A bit over two years ago I posted to this blog a piece about a decision by Russia’s prosecutor general to designate New York’s Bard College as an “undesirable organization.” Since 1997, Bard had been collaborating with St. Petersburg State University, offering a program of open enrollment liberal arts courses for students…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY And now for a happy story about the power of a union! Mason Richards, the new president of the AAUP chapter of the Los Angeles campus of Emerson College (ELAF-AAUP), met with me to discuss his chapter’s recent success, achieved with the help of the national AAUP staff, in securing a vastly…
BY KEITH E. WHITTINGTON It is not every day that a government minister writes to an American university president demanding that a book be immediately removed “from the curriculum of any of its courses” and that the institution “conduct a thorough review of the academic materials” used in its classes. But such is the demand…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Written by a who’s who of conservative and centrist campus free speech advocates—including Donald Downs, Robert George, Alan Charles Kors, Greg Lukianoff, John Tomasi, and Keith Whittington—the Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry released this month follow in the wake of the Chicago Principles, saying they “affirm this…
BY JOHN A. ETERNO Faculty at many universities are experiencing frustration. Universities should be bastions of creativity, scholarship, and democracy, but administrators have been using a corporate management style which invariably leaves the faculty behind. Most importantly, shared governance, once a staple of higher learning, is becoming a relic of the past. Faculty, to the…