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…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On Wednesday, June 14, 3-5pm at the Newseum in Washington DC, the Newseum and the AAUP are holding a special preview event for the AAUP annual conference, “The First Amendment on Campus: Freedom of Speech and the Press in Higher Education.” In order to attend this free event (which is open…
BY JONATHAN REES AND JONATHAN PORITZ A lot of people we know were beating up on an essay by Jeff Selingo in the Washington Post a few weeks ago. [See, for instance, Hank Reichman’s analysis here.] We certainly agree that putting tenure on some kind of clock won’t do anything to save universities money in…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL On June 1, President Trump announced that he was taking the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord, making the U.S., Syria, and Nicaragua (which felt the deal was not sufficiently ambitious), the only nations not to support the agreement. The Paris Agreement sets a series of goals and is…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a recent post to this blog, John K. Wilson took issue with the AAUP’s recommendation “that administrations and elected faculty bodies work jointly to establish institutional regulations that prohibit the surreptitious recording of classroom discourse or of private meetings between students and faculty members.” The recommendation came in the context of…
BY HANK REICHMAN On May 21, Professor Vida Samiian, Director of the Middle East Studies program at California State University, Fresno, and a former dean of humanities at the school, wrote an open letter announcing that she would not complete the remainder of her appointment in the CSU’s Faculty Early Retirement Program in protest of…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On Friday June 2, the Evanston Public Library held a hearing that may lead to the firing of librarian Lesley Williams this week. Her alleged crime? Posting a message on her personal Facebook page criticizing the library’s efforts at racial equity. This makes it an important case in the wake of…
BY AARON BARLOW I’ve been told, and by people I respect, not to use the word “neoliberal,” especially when dealing with education–let alone politics. “It is too amorphous,” they say. “It doesn’t really mean anything; it’s just something to rail against.” That has changed. Not only that but, today, we can no longer keep neoliberalism…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Earlier this year, the AAUP issued a statement against targeted online harassment of faculty. This statement has added significance with the news that Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has cancelled several speeches after receiving death threats in the wake of a commencement speech in which she called Donald Trump “a racist, sexist…
BY KELLY HAND We already knew from the Trump administration’s initial “skinny” budget proposal, released in March, that higher education would be on the chopping block. The fleshed-out budget proposal released on May 22 details cuts that would have a devastating impact on student aid, the arts and humanities, scientific research, and international education. Following up…