BY HANK REICHMAN “We can respect the right of free speech without having to respect the ideas being uttered.” — Joan W. Scott, “On Free Speech and Academic Freedom” (forthcoming) This is the final installment in a four-part series. Part I may be found here; part II is here; part III is here. Academic Freedom…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN In response to President Donald Trump’s decision to eliminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) president Rudy Fichtenbaum issued the following statement. The American Association of University Professors denounces in the strongest possible terms the decision by the Trump administration to end…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This chart is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: The list is surprising in the following ways: Of the 30 occupations on the list, 22 are what are traditionally considered “blue-collar” occupations. Of those 22 “blue-collar” occupations, all have been major sources of employment for decades: 7 are in general…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this summer I posted a piece praising conservative scholar Jonathan Marks for his forthright defense of the academic freedom of African-American activist Lisa Durden, dismissed from her part-time community college teaching position in response to comments she made on Fox News. Now Marks has weighed in on the controversy surrounding lecturer…
POSTED BY THE AAUP Alarmed by news that the University of Tampa has fired a faculty member over a tweet suggesting that Hurricane Harvey was “karma” for Texas because it voted Republican, the AAUP has been in contact with the affected faculty member, Kenneth Storey. Our understanding is that Storey, a visiting assistant professor of…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a statement issued August 28 by the Council of the American Historical Association. The AHA is also compiling an ongoing bibliography of the diverse perspectives of AHA members. The American Historical Association welcomes the emerging national debate about Confederate monuments. Much of this public statuary…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH All language is an inexact effort to reference and communicate aspects of reality, and ultimately, even the most seemingly straightforward statement can be shown to have ambiguous possibilities. That said, human society depends on language to function, and as this account of a judicial ruling makes clear, making unusual efforts to…
BY JOHN K. WILSON We have seen many cases recently of professors being fired for their political opinions on twitter, but the University of Tampa’s firing of Ken Storey today is one of the more extreme, ridiculous, and utterly bizarre examples. The University of Tampa announced: On Sunday, Aug. 27, visiting assistant professor of sociology…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the following statement signed by fifteen professors from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton universities appeared on the website of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton: We are scholars and teachers at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale who have some thoughts to share and advice to offer students who…
BY HANK REICHMAN As classes begin at colleges and universities across the country the wave of targeted online harassment of faculty members in response to comments made as private citizens — and the often cowardly responses of their administrations — continues unabated. At Dartmouth College, lecturer Mark Bray, an emerging expert on anti-fascist movements, received…