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…
BY AARON BARLOW “’Tis but thy name that is my enemy.” That line, and Juliet’s following thoughts, come to mind each time I listen to talk of interdisciplinary courses and programs. So bound are we by names and the divisions they create that we no longer seem able to see how ridiculous and small-minded we…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a letter addressed to the UC Berkeley campus and the larger Berkeley community, 76 faculty members from various departments have called for a complete boycott of classes and campus activities during the so-called “Free Speech Week” to be held on campus September 24-27. The week is sponsored by the Berkeley Patriot,…
BY JAY SMITH My article in the current issue of Academe, “Academic Freedom, Meet Big-Time College Sports,” tells a story about academic censorship. It provides a blow-by-blow account of the process whereby deans in the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill intervened in departmental course scheduling in order to prevent the teaching of…