Will the Adults on the Left Please Stand Up?

Image: I am exhausted.  I spent the entirety of yesterday with my mother in  the emergency room until she was admitted to the hospital and had a breakdown when I got home because it’s scary when a parent is in the hospital and you have that moment when you realize your they aren’t immortal.  I just wanted…

2016 AAUP Shared Governance Conference and Workshops

BY MICHAEL DECESARE The AAUP will hold its shared governance conference and workshops at the Loews Madison Hotel in Washington, DC, September 30 – October 2, 2016. Proposals are now being accepted for presentations on topics relating to academic governance (read the call for proposals). The conference will also include a series of training workshops…

The World Turned Upside Down

BY MARTIN KICH The British army’s fife and drum corps famously played this tune as it was giving up its weapons following the surrender at Yorktown. The sentiment seems very apropos during this strange presidential campaign in which Donald Trump sits atop the Republican primary polls because of, and not in spite of, his utter…

Free Speech is Fine, But the College President Knows Best

BY HANK REICHMAN The president of Williams College in Massachusetts, a supposedly “elite” liberal arts institution, has ordered the cancellation of a student-organized speaking engagement by an author characterized by many as a white supremacist.  In a letter to the college community on Thursday, Adam Falk said the views espoused in the writings of John…

Illinois Governor Turns Back on the Needy and Higher Education

BY PETER N. KIRSTEIN Right-wing ideologue, Governor Bruce Rauner, has indeed demonstrated his disdain for the vulnerable and marginalised working class of Illinois. A bright, luminous red-state reactionary in blue-state, pro-union, pro-labour Illinois, he has vetoed a bill that would have given $721,000,000 to help fund higher education for income-challenged students. The Illinois General Assembly, which marked…

Now the Shoe is On the Other Foot

BY HANK REICHMAN For some time we have been repeatedly assaulted by exaggerated claims from the political Right that student objections to institutional racism and sexism on campuses violate freedom of speech by imposing an orthodoxy of “political correctness.”  Conservative pundits have openly mocked student charges that racist and sexist behavior can be traumatic for…

Academic Freedom Threatened in Poland

BY HANK REICHMAN Scholars in Poland have rallied to the defense of one of the world’s leading Holocaust historians after reports that Poland intends to withdraw a national honor because he claimed that Poles were complicit in Nazi war crimes.  Polish-American scholar Jan T. Gross, Professor of History at Princeton University, is threatened with being…

“Agents of Change” Wins Awards at Film Festival

BY HANK REICHMAN Agents of Change, the documentary film about the student movements for ethnic studies at Cornell and San Francisco State Universities in the late ’60s and early ’70s, had its world premiere last week at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles.  A rough cut of the film was previously screened to…