BY BETH L. LUECK This is a guest post by Beth L. Lueck, a professor of English in the department of languages and literature at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. When my younger son came home from a ten-month deployment to Afghanistan in February 2015, he discovered his mother at the center of a right-wing maelstrom…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is from the “Capital Roundup for January 12, written by Lee Gazette for the Des Moines Register: “A state senator again has filed a bill seeking to end the tenure system at Iowa’s three state universities. Sen. Brad Zaun, R-Urbandale, has filed the bill before, but this year Senate File…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL It may be an effort to continue Bernie Sander’s legacy by re-introducing the “free college” movement. It may also be a way to recast the Democratic Party in its “return to the working class defender” role. Or, it may be that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is staking his claim to…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today, the California Faculty Association (CFA), an AAUP-affiliate representing 25,000+ faculty members in the 23-campus California State University (CSU) system, released a new report, “Equity, Interrupted: How California Is Cheating Its Future,” the first in a promised series. Among its findings, the report details decisions impacting the CSU and its students, and…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today the Washington Post published an important op-ed piece, “If colleges keep killing academic freedom, civilization will die, too,” by José A. Cabranes, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Cabranes, a Bill Clinton appointee and highly respected jurist, previously served as General Counsel for Yale University…
BY HANK REICHMAN I’m an historian by discipline, but I didn’t attend this year’s meetings of the American Historical Association (AHA) last week in Denver. I wish I had, if only to have heard the discussion of “Historical Expertise and Political Authority,” described by Colleen Flaherty in her report on the meeting for Inside Higher…
BY SUZANE BRICKER This is a guest post by Suzane Bricker, Associate Adjunct Online Professor for the Academic Writing Department at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) and an editor, writer, and poet. She has also taught at the University of Southern California (USC) and California State University, Fullerton. You can reach her by…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has issued a new report, “Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics” (pdf) that is absolutely breathtaking in its call for political repression of education. The NAS Report demands, “The New Civics must be excised from every part of the American educational system, from kindergarten…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today more than 12,000 University of California (UC) administrative, clerical and support workers, members of Teamsters Local 2010, walked off the job to protest numerous unfair labor practices and violations of state law committed by the UC administration. The walkout at all ten UC campuses, five medical centers and three national laboratories…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Twitter has been central to a number of controversial cases that have tested the definitions and the limits of academic freedom. The brevity and compression of tweets means that they exist outside of any fixed context and they are therefore very frequently tonally ambiguous. What seems very provocative or even outrageous…