BY AARON BARLOW The problem isn’t the field, it’s a process that no longer meets its original ends. Yesterday, Hank Reichman posted on a hoax that takes advantage of a flawed process to try to single out a particular field for derision. What follows is merely an addendum, with my own particular slant, to what he…
BY HANK REICHMAN My twitter feed was humming this morning with reaction to an article published in Skeptic Magazine, by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay. They managed to submit a hoax article — “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” — to a journal they purported to be about gender studies and quickly celebrated this achievement…
BY HENRY REICHMAN On Thursday, May 18, California State University, Los Angeles student and immigration rights activist Claudia Rueda was taken into custody by Border Patrol agents as she moved her family’s car outside their home. Federal agents had detained Rueda’s mother earlier this month. The following statement on her detention was released today by the…
BY HANK REICHMAN On April 27, Queen Elizabeth II formally assented to the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, approved by Britain’s Conservative Parliament earlier in the year. The act accelerated the privatization of Britain’s higher education system, a process begun decades earlier and which in key respects mirrors American developments. The following comments on…
BY HANK REICHMAN A few weeks ago the California state auditor released damning reports on the management of both the California State University Chancellor’s Office and the University of California Office of the President (UCOP), with the latter stirring up a hornet’s nest of controversy in the legislature and the media. At a Board of…
BY AARON BARLOW A decade or more ago, at a faculty party in New York City, I listened in as a diverse group of faculty spoke casually and disparagingly of “hillbillies,” “rednecks” and “white trash.” I reminded them that they were speaking of my own people (my ancestry is completely Appalachian), though they shouldn’t really be…
BY LAURA MARKWARDT An investigative report released today by the AAUP concludes that the administration of Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, fired Erlene Grise-Owens, a long-serving professor of social work, in blatant violation of academic freedom and due process. The report finds that Spalding’s administration abruptly terminated Professor Grise-Owens’s tenured appointment because she criticized the administration’s…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL There is some truth to the saying that those who fail to learn from the past will be doomed to repeat it. Essentially, this was the message that former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers delivered recently as part of his larger concern that Massachusetts not become complacent despite U.S. unemployment hitting a…
BY GWENDOLYN BRADLEY Guidance issued late last year by the United States Department of Labor heightens the potential for faculty on contingent appointments to get unemployment compensation over breaks between semesters. The guidance, Unemployment Insurance Program Letter No. 05-17, explains the unemployment compensation standards applied to contingent faculty members and increases the likelihood that they will be…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following open letter to Yale University President Peter Salovey appeared yesterday in the Yale Daily News. Dear President Salovey: As members of the Yale Law faculty, we write to express our disagreement with your May 3, 2017 public letter regarding graduate student teaching fellow unionization. In the letter, you suggest that…