POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN It was a tale of two speeches. Yesterday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos addressed the right-wing American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) meeting in Denver, where she accused teacher unions of being “defenders of the status quo” who care only about “school systems” and not about individual children. Just hours earlier Randi…
BY IRENE NGUN The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is conducting a study of the impacts of gender-related experiences on women in science, engineering, and medical fields, and they have contracted with RTI International to gather information for the study. RTI International plans to conduct one-hour, in-depth telephone interviews with approximately 40 women…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the year since the attempted coup in Turkey, a “staggering” number of academics have faced criminal investigations, detentions, prosecutions, mass dismissal, expulsion and restrictions on travel, according to an open letter to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, signed by Robert Quinn, executive director of Scholars at Risk (SAR), the New…
BY GILLIAN STEINBERG When I tell people that I left a tenured university position to teach high school, most suggest that I’ve taken a significant step backwards. But with so many college teachers either underemployed or feeling desperately pressured, more might want to consider the switch to high school teaching. High school teaching is not,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier today Martin Kich posted a piece on legislation being considered in Congress that, according to an account by Glen Greenwald, “would make it a felony for Americans to support the international boycott against Israel.” While I think this legislation is unnecessary, ill-advised and frustratingly vague, I am skeptical that it is, as Marty argues,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for the Intercept, Glen Greenwald reports: The criminalization of political speech and activism against Israel has become one of the gravest threats to free speech in the West. In France, activists have been arrested and prosecuted for wearing T-shirts advocating a boycott of Israel. The U.K. has enacted a series of measures designed to outlaw such activism. In the…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH At first glance, I thought that this might be a video of a lively discussion at this year’s annual meeting: As the video captioning makes clear, a debate about a massive infrastructure bill in the Taiwanese legislature degenerated into a partisan melee. I have checked several sources, and I have…
BY HANK REICHMAN “If there’s an organized outrage machine, we need an organized response.” Those words from Tressie McMillan Cottom, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, author of the excellent Lower Ed, prolific blogger, and frequent (and often witty) presence on Twitter, headline a story in this morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education on…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a victory for academic freedom and faculty rights, a California State University, Fullerton part-time anthropology lecturer facing dismissal after a fracas at a campus demonstration in February has been reinstated by order of an arbitrator. The university’s College Republicans had accused Eric Canin of striking one of them at the demonstration.…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following was posted on the blog of the Western Michigan University AAUP chapter: We join our colleagues at AFT-Michigan, along with our AFT-affiliated colleagues here at WMU, the Professional Instructors Organization (PIO) and Teaching Assistants Union (TAU), in condemning in the strongest possible terms the death sentence of admitted WMU student Mujtaba’a…