BY HANK REICHMAN Recently I had occasion to look a bit into the history of the University of California at Berkeley, where I earned my doctorate and in whose shadow I have lived most of my adult life. In doing so, I encountered an interesting document, “Shared Governance at the University of California: An Historical…
BY HANK REICHMAN Almost one in four lecturers at universities in the United Kingdom claims to have been subjected to bullying by colleagues over their academic views, a recently published survey suggests. Of 2,300 people who responded to a poll on academic freedom, 23 per cent said they had suffered workplace bullying on account of…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is reposted with permission from the website of the Colorado state conference of the AAUP. Despite that the symposium gods burdened Boulder with an inevitable spring blizzard, the AAUP Academic Freedom Symposium at CU-Boulder on April 29th was inspiring and memorable. The melodramatic weather could not discourage participants or…
BY HANK REICHMAN Blowhard-in-chief Donald Trump’s condemnation of “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides” in the wake of this weekend’s events in Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia (UVA), has been criticized so extensively and justifiably, even by members of his own party — many of whom themselves bear responsibility…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following are four statements issued by the University of Virginia and President Theresa A. Sullivan over the last 36 hours. They are presented from the most recent to the least recent, and they are followed by news updates. President Sullivan Condemns Demonstration Violence As events have unfolded on…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In this series, I have highlighted headlines that are cleverly expressed, making use of puns, irony, figurative language, or unexpected word choices to grab a reader’s attention. Not surprisingly, the Trump administration has so unabashedly flouted all sorts of political conventions that headline writers have felt freer to write headlines…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL At the annual meeting of the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) in Minneapolis last week, there was a good deal of attention paid to how higher education should address the steady decline in support for America’s colleges and universities among consumers (that is, students and families) and…
BY LUIS I. PRÁDANOS Every time I mention the obvious in a classroom—that most industrial economic activities deplete energy and materials and, therefore, constant economic growth in the context of a limited biosphere is a biophysical impossibility—I am moved by some students’ honest reactions. Their response will be some variation of “That makes sense. Why did nobody tell us before that as the global economy grows, the living systems of…
BY NEAL H. HUTCHENS Today, Neal H. Hutchens, member of the AAUP Litigation Committee and professor of Higher Education at the University of Mississippi, published this column in Hechinger Report: Last week, the idea of a potential move by the U.S. Department of Justice received swift pushback from supporters of affirmative action in higher education,…
BY AARON BARLOW In early 2016, I shared on this blog a statement by a tenured professor recently fired by the University of California at Riverside. One of the comments, by a former colleague of the ex-professor, accused me of posting his statement solely as “clickbait.” I chuckled, but the accusation rankled: the Academe blog…