BY HANK REICHMAN For some time now colleges and universities across the country have been roiled by debates over so-called “safe spaces.” On one side stand those who argue that many members of the higher education community, especially various minorities, need “safe spaces” free from potentially harassing behavior and verbal abuse. Sometimes they have gone…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is from the late Leonard Cohen’s song “Democracy”: It’s coming from the women and the men Oh baby, we’ll be making love again We’ll be going down so deep The river’s going to weep, And the mountain’s going to shout Amen It’s coming like the tidal flood beneath the lunar…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Whereas the primary mission of Ohio’s colleges and universities is to educate students, Whereas colleges and universities have increasingly and irresponsibly devoted resources to bloated administrative bureaucracies, to equally ambitious and expensive sports programs supported by ever-more elaborate and more expensive athletic facilities, and a seemingly endless succession of other expensive…
BY STEVE MUMME The academic freedom wars rage across the country as professors debate trigger warnings, hostile environments, bullying eradication, and multiple other sins infringing on academic speech. The discerning reader will surely have noticed that most of this discourse is located on university campuses, not community colleges. There’s a reason for that. As we at…
BY AARON BARLOW There’s an essay on Chronicle,com by NYU professor Eric Klinenberg called “What Trump’s Win Compels Scholars To Do.” After discussing the overreach of Big Data, Klinenberg writes: There’s one other thing that universities must do better: teach student skills for learning, discerning, reasoning, and communicating in an informational environment dominated by quick…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following op-ed piece appeared on November 9 in the Daily Bruin, the campus newspaper at UCLA. It was reposted as well by the UCLA Faculty Association under the above title. For those unaware, according to Wikipedia “a flexitarian diet is one that is plant-based with the occasional inclusion of meat…
BY HANK REICHMAN In 1998 the late philosopher Richard Rorty published Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. While I was familiar with Rorty’s interesting brand of neo-pragmatism, with its debt to AAUP founding father John Dewey, I must have missed this book and have no recollection of its overall arguments or its reception. …
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement was issued today. The AAUP and the AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress have never endorsed or supported a candidate for president of the United States or otherwise engaged in partisan political activity on the national level. For over one hundred years the AAUP has vigilantly defended the professional rights…
BY AARON BARLOW President of the National Council of Teachers of English Doug Hesse posted on Facebook today that he is scrapping his upcoming presidential address “hoping I can find something to say to about the prospects of teaching reading and writing in a country where so much hatred abounds, where facts do not matter,…
BY AARON BARLOW