BY JENNIFER RUTH I had an abortion when I was 20. I was between my sophomore and junior year in college, living in Berkeley, taking a class on existentialism and working at a grocery store. When I realized that I was pregnant, I felt ashamed. I was ashamed of the times I had complacently said,…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In “Adjunct and Tenured Faculty Must Unite to Resist Pandemic Opportunism on Campus”, a piece I wrote recently for Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt and Bertin M. Louis Jr.’s “Challenging the Corporate University” special series in Truthout, I argued that “it has become clear that adjuncts and tenured faculty alike will only be able to…
BY JONATHAN REES I’m a member of the AAUP Committee on Teaching, Research, and Publication. Last week, committee chair Hank Reichman and I convened a listening session at the AAUP biennial meeting to start the long process of revising the organization’s statement regarding online education. The existing Statement on Online and Distance Education dates from…
Note: At the end of April, the editors of the Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, penned an editorial supporting BDS and Palestinian liberation. In response,150 members of the Harvard Faculty wrote a statement criticizing the editorial. Another group of faculty penned their own response, which was published in the Harvard Crimson. This letter is…
BY RACHEL WHEELER For my sanity, I’ve had to cut back on my doom-scrolling habit and limit my time on Twitter. But there’s one type of content I’m totally there for: over the course of spring semester—our fifth pandemic semester—as more faculty ventured back into physical classrooms and back to in-person conferences and lectures, what…
BY SHU WAN In the past few years, the Chinese government’s consistent interventions with—and suppression of—electronic resources in academic libraries in the nation have become an internationally controversial issue. One example of such censorship was a 2017 incident involving the China Quarterly. A statement by the journal’s publisher, Cambridge University Press, noted that “all international…
BY AN ANONYMOUS SAINT CATHERINE UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR Saint Catherine University sits on an idyllic green bluff in a serene part of Saint Paul, Minnesota. It’s not too far from the Mississippi River. When it’s hushed, you can hear the faint sounds of a barge horn as it slowly heads down to New Orleans. It’s the…
BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE University of Florida administrators have created a slideshow to help faculty understand the implications of the state’s new law, House Bill 7, also known as the Stop WOKE Act. One slide says, “At its core, the bill’s message is: ‘No one likes to be told what to think. And that includes students.’…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On May 23, the Princeton Board of Trustees voted to fire tenured professor Joshua Katz on the recommendation of a dean and the president, and with the approval of a faculty committee. Katz’s defenders claim that he is being persecuted for his extramural utterances calling a black student group a “terrorist…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On March 16, 2021, Boise State University ordered the suspension of fifty-five classes enrolling more than 1,299 students in its required course, UF 200: Foundations of Ethics & Diversity. The mass suspension lasted for eight days, and it is one of the largest targeted suspensions of a course in the history…