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…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH On January 3, John McNay, the President of the Ohio Conference of AAUP, appeared with Ohio AFL-CIO President Tim Burga on Ed Ferenc’s radio program “America’s Workforce Radio.” Among other topics related to the labor movement, they addressed “right to work” theats looming in Ohio and nationally. The audio of the…
BY AARON BARLOW Questions of ‘intellectual property’—oh, how I hate that term—continue to plague us in this new digital age, and in ways never contemplated when patents and copyrights and trademarks and more were first protected by law in the English/American tradition three- and four-hundred years ago. We have built up assumptions of ‘ownership’ without…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The Committee to Protect Journalists has released its list of journalists who were killed in 2016; clicking on the journalists’ names will link you to their stories: 48 Journalists Killed in 2016/Motive Confirmed Terminology explained Mohammad Nasir Mudasir , Melli Paigham Radio December 15, 2016, in Mohammed Agha District, Logar Province, Afghanistan…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In early December, the Committee to Protect Journalists released its annual listing of journalists jailed for political reasons over the past year. Here are the totals by nation: Azerbaijan: 5 Bahrain: 7 Bangladesh: 2 Cameroon: 1 China: 38 Cuba: 2 Egypt: 25 Eritrea: 17 Ethiopia: 16 Gambia: 3 India: 1 Israel…
BY MARTIN KICH Writing for the Dayton Daily News Josh Sweigart reports that an ongoing federal investigation of Wright State University has cost at least $2.2 million dollars, and counting. That total includes salary and benefits for suspended administrators, severance payments to an administrator who retired, a legal settlement to a fired administrator, legal fees,…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN In a post last week on Bill Moyers’ website New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen outlined a series of troubling (and a few encouraging) developments regarding the survival of a free press in the U.S. Here are some highlights: For a free press as a check on power this is…
BY HANK REICHMAN Aaron Barlow (here and here) and Martin Kich (here) have already posted items to this blog about the recently renewed legislative threats to academic freedom in Wisconsin, with Aaron calling appropriate attention to the excellent op-ed piece published in today’s New York Times by UW-Madison professor Donald Moynihan. But because I and…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement was approved by the Council of the American Historical Association (AHA) at its meeting on January 5: The AHA upholds the rights of students, faculty, and other historians to speak freely and to engage in nonviolent political action expressing diverse perspectives on historical or contemporary issues. We condemn…