BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted an item on threats to academic freedom at Central European University (CEU) in Hungary and European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP). Yesterday, tens of thousands of demonstrators swarmed Budapest in defense of the CEU. The protest drew some of the largest crowds against right-wing prime minister Victor Orban’s…
BY AARON BARLOW Stella Nyanzi, a medical anthropologist who earned her PhD at the University of London and who is currently a research fellow at Makerere University’s Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) in Kampala, Uganda (though her exact status at MISR seems a little uncertain), has been arrested in Kampala for “various offenses related…
BY HANK REICHMAN In January, the Reclaim California Higher Education Coalition issued a report, The $48 Fix, which demonstrated that California could provide today’s students with the same accessible low-cost university experience that California successfully offered its students from the 1960s through the 1990s through an income surtax of no more than $48/year for the…
BY HANK REICHMAN On April 4, the Hungarian Parliament passed a law that could compel Central European University (CEU), founded in 1991 by the liberal financier and philanthropist George Soros, the liberal financier and philanthropist who promotes democratic, transparent government and freedom of expression through his Open Society Foundations, to cease operations in the country. The…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL One of the great myths about American higher education is that all colleges are wealthy. If most Americans have an mental image of a college, it’s often a bucolic bricks-and-mortar residential facility separated by rolling green lawns, entered through an impressive if forbidding-looking gate, and populated by attractive students who drive…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Review of Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus by Laura Kipnis (HarperCollins, April 4, 2017) When Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis wrote an irreverent essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2015 about regulations on campus, and discussed a sexual assault case, it sparked discussion, praise, outrage, protest (literal mattress-waving…
BY AARON BARLOW Anyone who teaches at a community college, an urban state university or almost anywhere outside of the top research institutions has run across it: We are not the equals of the scholars at Harvard, the University of Chicago and others of their ilk. Nor are we quite the teachers they are; our…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL In post-industrial America, the roles played by large nonprofits – especially its hospitals and universities – power the economic engines in many regional economies. What would cities like San Francisco, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Boston look like without their large educational and medical research complexes? Would other cities, such as Houston, Chicago,…
BY AARON BARLOW When my father returned home from the Pacific after the end of WWII, he found no signs remained of his existence in his parents’ house. His mother, probably fearing he would never return (he was gone for three years), had ‘disappeared’ all of his belongings. He never forgave her for that. This…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Higher education is misunderstood and struggling financially, but the majority of college and university presidents are increasingly confident that their institutions are financially stable. These seemingly contradictions were found in Inside Higher Education’s annual survey of 706 campus leaders. Let’s set aside the obvious political concerns among presidents about the Trump…