POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is excerpted from a December 7 article on the website of the Index on Censorship. A group of court reporters scurried along the halls of Istanbul’s massive Çağlayan Courthouse on the morning of 7 December, taking pictures of the tables showing the trial schedules of several high criminal courts…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week word arrived that Princeton University history graduate student Xiyue Wang, sentenced in July by the Iranian government to ten years in prison for alleged espionage, is being transferred from general detention to Ward 7, a more extreme prison unit run by Iran’s intelligence agency. When Wang arrived there, his…
BY MICHAEL DECESARE In 2016, the AAUP’s annual meeting voted to add The College of Saint Rose to the censure list. The most egregious of the administration’s and governing board’s many transgressions had been the termination of 23 tenured and tenure-track faculty appointments as part of a top-down “academic prioritization” process that eliminated a number of…
BY JUDITH BUTLER Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of the Berkeley Faculty Association and the AAUP. The following is the slightly edited text of remarks she delivered December 4 at a forum sponsored by the Berkeley Academic Senate, “Perspectives on Freedom…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today the AAUP released a new report, “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom.” The report details troubling threats to academic freedom in the physical and natural sciences that have been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s hostility to science. International scientific exchange and, especially, the charging of innocent Chinese or…
BY HANK REICHMAN Jordan Klepper’s “The Opposition” on Comedy Central tries to pick up where the old Colbert Report left off. Like Colbert, Klepper takes on the persona of an arrogant right-wing commentator to satirize the foibles and falsehoods often promoted by such. Last night his “correspondents” took on Turning Point, USA, sponsor of the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Four days after the expiration of their contract, hundreds of faculty and staff at the City University of New York (CUNY), which serves a half million students, kicked off a contract campaign by their union, the AAUP-affiliated Professional Staff Congress (PSC), December 4 with a press conference, rallies at two CUNY campuses,…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL There are a number of reasons why higher education no longer enjoys the level of status and prestige that it once did in American society. Public perceptions that confuse sticker price and the cost of attendance, the unwillingness or inability of many American families to share the financial burden incurred by…
BY NANCY LONG In 2014, the AAUP joined a nationwide effort to obtain an exemption to the copyright laws that protect authors’ rights to fair use in the digital age. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) imposes criminal and civil liability on creators who circumvent technologies like encryption that protect copyrighted works. This poses a problem…
BY HANK REICHMAN Temple University Professor Sara Goldrick-Rab’s book, Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, is one of the most important books on higher education to appear in recent years. The book demonstrates, through both comprehensive data and often heart-wrenching personal stories, how U.S. students have been…