BY HARRY HELLENBRAND Harry Hellenbrand served for many years as provost and interim president at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) following a distinguished career as a faculty member, academic senator, department chair and dean at CSU campuses. The essay below addresses changes in curriculum imposed on the CSU’s 23 campuses and their faculty by the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Fresh from the embarrassment of rescinding a fellowship to whistleblower Chelsea Manning while welcoming disgraced Trumpers Corey Lewandowski and Sean Spicer, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has again privileged spokespersons for the right while denying their opponents a voice. Thursday and Friday the school will host a conference on “The Future of…
BY SUSAN HEGEMAN We’ve had a tumultuous fall in Florida. It began in August, shortly after the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, when Richard Spencer, one of the speakers in Charlottesville, applied for a speaking venue at the University of Florida. UF initially denied his request, citing safety concerns, especially after it…
BY MICHAEL DECESARE One of the primary findings of the AAUP’s investigative report regarding the University of Iowa’s 2015 presidential search was that “the search was structured and engineered by the regents’ leadership from the outset to identify a figure from the business world congenial to its image of ‘transformative leadership.’” An AP story out yesterday confirms this conclusion.…
BY SARANNA THORNTON On September 7, 2017 Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, harshly criticized the “failed system” of policies promulgated in Dear Colleague Letters issued in 2011 and 2014. DeVos rightly noted that some colleges and universities have indelibly harmed survivors when their reports of sexual assault were “swept under the rug”. The Secretary rightly…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL The Boston Globe recently reported on the decision by record numbers of international students to choose Canada when pursuing their higher education goals. Reporter Laura Krantz noted: Some reasons are longstanding – fear of gun crime in the United States and cheaper tuition up north. But the 2016 election, and with…
BY AARON BARLOW Hank Reichman, on this blog the other day, quoted Donald Moynihan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin: “More people now believe that students oppose free speech, based on a flawed survey and resulting headlines. No correction will fix that.” He was referring to a “survey” conducted by a Brookings Institution Senior…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of an op-ed piece authored by the Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association (BFA) and published September 26 in the Daily Californian, the independent campus newspaper at the University of California at Berkeley, in response to recent events involving Milo Yiannopoulos’s failed “Free Speech Week.” The…
BY HANK REICHMAN Dozens of Georgetown University students, joined by law professors, gathered this morning to protest a speech by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The faculty members initially took a knee and later linked arms. Inside the hall where Sessions spoke, a line of students sitting near the back stood up and placed black…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following announcement was released today by the California Faculty Association (CFA, an affiliate of the AAUP. CFA represents more than 28,000 tenured and tenure-track professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors and coaches on the 23 campuses of the California State University system. The California Faculty Association’s Bargaining Team and Board of Directors…