BY HANK REICHMAN It seems the much-ballyhooed and monstrously misnamed “Free Speech Week,” organized by the infamous bigot-provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and scheduled to unfold September 24-27 at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), may not take place after all. And if it does, it will be in a scaled-down version. The event was to…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Dear Speaker Ryan, Majority Leader McConnell, Democratic Leader Pelosi, and Democratic Leader Schumer: We write out of deep concern for approximately two million Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. Over the past five years, hundreds of thousands of these young people came forward in good…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The New York Times Editorial Board has published a lengthy editorial on the Trump administration’s persistent efforts to deny scientific consensus and to place in positions of power people who share that disdain for scientific truths that conflict with narrow corporate interests and Far-Right ideological talking points. The editorial begins by…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The World Socialist Web Site includes a feature that is must-reading for anyone interested in labor issues. The site provides digests of labor news by region: “Workers Struggles: The Americas”; “Workers Struggles: Europe, Middle East, and Africa”; and “Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia, and the Pacific.” This week’s edition of “Workers Struggles:…
BY HANK REICHMAN In all the hubbub over the free speech rights of outside speakers on campus, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that efforts by students and administrations at colleges and universities to bar those they deem controversial are hardly limited to right-wing provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter, or Richard Spencer. …
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this year I posted an item about political threats to the existence of Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and European University in St. Petersburg, Russia. The threats to both institutions continue, but it now appears that European University may be at the end of its rope, having lost both its…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following podcasts are available from New Yorker: The Antifa Handbook The author of a new book about the leftist movement explains why its members will resort to violence as a form of political action. Long a Bastion of Free Speech, U.C. Berkeley’s Commitment Is Tested In the wake of Charlottesville,…
BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN This week, the Defenders of Civil Rights called on the UNC Law School administration and faculty to make the Center for Civil Rights a clinical project of the law school, to ensure that the community lawyering performed with and for low-wealth communities of color will continue. On Friday, the UNC Board of Governors…
BY HANK REICHMAN It’s a pretty safe assumption that a trans woman like Chelsea Manning, who served seven years in military prison for leaking classified documents revealing U.S. government involvement in torture, is not someone who can normally expect to be named a Visiting Fellow at Harvard. But on Wednesday the university’s John F. Kennedy…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY Activists have been fighting for years for decent working conditions and pay for adjuncts and graduate student instructors. The majority of these activists are adjuncts and graduate students themselves. They have formed collective bargaining units under the auspices of the AAUP and other unions, and they have created organizations such as the…