POSTED BY MARTIN KICH My Father at Work My father was a union man. For most of his last twenty-seven years, he worked in a munitions plant. High on the long brick building there were yellow letters– A M M U N I T I O N. The plant was located on a cliff above…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH What follows is the third section of the most recent higher education report produced by the Ohio Conference of AAUP. John McNay, the President of the Conference, and Sara Kilpatrick, the Executive Director of the Conference, deserves kudos for doing the bulk of the work on this report. The report has…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Harry Keyishian was a special honoree at the AAUP’s annual awards luncheon today ‘for his courage, integrity, and unstinting commitment to academic freedom.” This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, which established academic freedom as “a special concern of the First Amendment.”…
BY JOHN K. WILSON At the 103rd Annual Meeting today, the AAUP members voted to pass resolutions on funding cuts to the University of Puerto Rico and Illinois colleges, imposed censure on two administrations, and removed two administrations from the censure list. The AAUP voted to impose censure on the Community College of Aurora in…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier today I was privileged to participate in a stimulating discussion of free speech on campuses on the radio call-in show “Your Call” on KALW-FM in San Francisco. Participating in the call were moderator Renee Kemp; Samantha Harris, director of policy research at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE);…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This morning, Paul Ryan eloquently and passionately asked members of Congress and the citizens whom they represent to look beyond partisan political divisions and to focus, instead, much more than we almost ever do, on the fundamental values that most of us profess to cherish. Unfortunately, the Far Right media has…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL A hotly debated topic making the rounds in higher education now is whether American colleges and universities – public and private – face a round of mergers and acquisitions over the next several years. There are a number of reasons that the discussion of this topic had gained momentum. Tuition discount…
BY HANK REICHMAN “. . . the opposition role of the university flows from its very nature as a center of free inquiry” — Robert Paul Wolff, The Ideal of the University, p. 56. This is the third installment in a four-part series. Part I may be found here; part II is here. Are Some…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Albert Einstein was a member of the AAUP from 1935 until his death in 1955. The following questions about academic freedom and political inquisitions were posed to Einstein in the 1950s, during the McCarthy era. They come from a document held in the Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center at…
BY HANK REICHMAN “The speech we must protect most forcefully is not the speech we hate the most, but the speech that is most endangered.” — CUNY Professor of History Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) on Twitter, April 25 “The countless fruitful discussions that happen all the time in college classrooms don’t grab headlines.” — UW Milwaukee…