Sandusky Costs Penn State Almost $10 Million More in One Week

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is from the Department of Education’s Office of Communications: The U.S. Department of Education today announced that it is seeking to impose on Penn State University a record fine of nearly $2.4 million for failing to comply with the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act after a comprehensive…

Free Market Centers: Academic or Political?

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Over the past few years this blog has posted a number of items related to the work of the conservative North Carolina-based John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.  In March, 2015, John Wilson reported that the center had praised the decision of the University of North Carolina Board of…

A CUNY Student Bill of Rights

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN CUNY Rising, a coalition of the AAUP-affiliated Professional Staff Congress (PSC) and other community and student allies working to build support for public higher education and the City University of New York (CUNY) has issued “A CUNY Student Bill of Rights,” launching a petition campaign to support investment in higher education…

Nothing Certain But Death & Taxes? Not for Higher Ed.

BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Rick Seltzer reported recently in Inside Higher Education on a complex decision by Princeton University to settle litigation with neighboring homeowners who argued that the University was a profit-making institution and therefore subject potentially to millions of additional dollars in taxes annually. Arrangement Doesn’t Settle Issue of Tax Exemption The arrangement…

Freedom and Repression at the U of Chicago

BY JOHN K. WILSON I thought I was reading a campus newspaper from the 1950s when I saw this headline yesterday in the Chicago Maroon: “Communist Plans To Defy Campus Ban.” Suddenly, the University of Chicago has become the epicenter of several free speech controversies. It turns out that it’s pretty easy to write big…

Ugly Blacklist Posters Spur Resistance

BY HANK REICHMAN In previous posts to this blog I have criticized the blacklisting activities of two pro-Israel organizations, the Amcha Initiative and Canary Mission.  The former group published a list of 218 faculty members in Middle East studies at U.S. colleges and universities who signed a petition calling for an academic boycott of Israel…

Remembering Tom Hayden

BY HANK REICHMAN I first met Tom Hayden, who died eight days ago at age 76, when we both participated in the occupation of Mathematics Hall during the Columbia University student rebellion of 1968.  Tom was, of course, no longer a student and had no institutional affiliation with Columbia, but he joined the protesters both…

Quotation of the Day

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Trump said at a rally in Albuquerque: “You know, it would be much easier working for Obama or working for Crooked Hillary because, frankly, when you’re working for Hillary, she wants to let people just pour in. You could have 650 million people pour in, and we do nothing about it. Think of…