BY HANK REICHMAN In March I am scheduled to participate in a plenary panel on “The Impact of Anti-Intellectualism on the State of Higher Education” at the annual Hunter College Conference on Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions in New York. To prepare I’ve been reading (I’m embarrassed to admit, for the first…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Ibram X. Kendi, assistant professor of African American history at the University of Florida and winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction for Stamped from the Beginning: A Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, will be the plenary speaker at the AAUP’s Annual Conference on the State of…
BY MARTIN KICH Thoracic surgeon Henry Heimlich died on Saturday, December 17, at age 96. In 1962, Heimlich “developed the Heimlich Chest Drain Valve which was credited with saving many soldiers’ lives in the Vietnam War and is still used for patients undergoing chest surgery.” But most people would not be able to tell you…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Continental Europe In 2015, as the influx of refugees into Europe began to reach crisis proportions, Markus Kressler and Juan David Mendieta co-founded Kiron University, an institution exclusively available to refugees. The two major issues for the university’s potential students were access and funding. The issue of access was addressed by…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following statement has been released by the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), which is affiliated with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE): Language is powerful. It empowers individuals to explore and change themselves and their worlds. A belief in this power of language and the abilities…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH What follows is a news release from the Department of Education. Given how long it took the Department of Education to crack down on abuses at for-profit institutions, one wonders how much of that oversight will be reversed or simply ignored by the Trump administration. One would think that allowing a…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is a photo of student housing at a university in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China: Reuters/Stringer
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The United Kingdom, Part 4: Northern Ireland In October 2015, Mike Larkin contributed a feature article to the Belfast Telegraph that challenged the fundamental logic in the arguments for the corporatization of Northern Ireland’s universities: “When is a university not a university? When it is a business perhaps? The recent episodes…
BY HANK REICHMAN Regular readers of this blog will recall how last year New York University Professor Andrew Ross was stopped from boarding a flight to Abu Dhabi, where NYU has a campus and where Ross had intended to conduct research. Ross, a vocal critic of the human-rights record of the United Arab Emirates, was…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last month I posted to this blog Christopher Newfield’s excellent response to the notorious New York Times op-ed by Mark Lilla on “identity politics.” If you haven’t read Chris’s piece, you should. At the time I mentioned that “I still may post more on this topic,” and since then I’ve been collecting…