Best Quotation of the 2016 Campaign (At Least for Today)
“Hindsight is 20/20. But Rand is an ophthalmologist.” —Republican consultant on the end of Rand Paul’s presidential bid
Chicago Teachers Reject Offer; Board “Declares War”
BY HENRY REICHMAN On Monday, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) rejected the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Board of Education’s latest contract offer “because it does not address the difficult conditions in the schools, the lack of services to our neediest students or address the long-term fiscal crisis that threatens to gut public education in the…
U of Chicago Faculty Member Accused of Sexual Misconduct, Resigns
BY MARTIN KICH Writing for New York magazine Jessica Roy reports on the resignation, under threat of termination, of Jason Lieb, a molecular biologist at the University of Chicago. Lieb had been accused of making “unwelcome sexual advances to multiple female grad students,” most notably at an “off-campus retreat,” and of engaging “in sexual activity…
AAUP Asks Missouri to Lift Melissa Click Suspension
BY HENRY REICHMAN The national AAUP has called on the University of Missouri to lift its suspension of Melissa A. Click, the assistant professor who was videotaped attempting to remove a student journalist from the site of a campus protest. In a letter emailed yesterday to the Columbia campus’s interim chancellor, Henry C. (Hank) Foley,…
AAUP/AFT-Wisconsin Statement on Proposed Regent Policies
The AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin today issued the following statement on draft policies on tenure issued by University of Wisconsin regents, which incorporate a number of sound elements, but fall short in other areas. To download the statement as a .pdf file, go here. For more on these proposals see UW-Milwaukee AAUP…
Modify and Redirect
This analysis of the U. of Wisconsin draft policies on layoff and post-tenure review comes from the blog of Nicholas Fleisher, Vice-President of the U. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee AAUP Chapter.
Where Are All the Good Guys with Knives?
BY MARTIN KICH These are the opening paragraphs of an article published by New York magazine: “A 27-year-old man was slashed in the face early on Sunday morning after arguing with a woman he didn’t know in a Harlem subway station. The New York Post reports that the fight occurred around 3 a.m. on the southbound platform of…
New February 15 Deadline for Journal
BY KELLY HAND It’s not too late to submit a paper for the AAUP’s 2016 Journal of Academic Freedom. In the slushy aftermath of the major East Coast snowstorm that caused closures and delays for the AAUP’s national office and many higher education institutions, the deadline for submissions to Volume 7 of the Journal for…
Why Academic Freedom Matters: Flint Edition
BY HANK REICHMAN If you want evidence about why academic freedom matters, then read this piece from the Washington Post about Virginia Tech Professor of Civil Engineering Marc Edwards, “The Heroic Professor Who Helped Uncover the Flint Lead Water Crisis.” Last week, bowing to intense pressure from the beleaguered people of Flint, Michigan Governor Rick…
Privacy, Data Security, and Governance in the University of California
BY HENRY REICHMAN Over the weekend Phil Matier and Andrew Ross of the San Francisco Chronicle broke a story [behind a paywall] that revealed growing concerns among UC Berkeley faculty about a previously secret decision by University of California President Janet Napolitano, former Secretary of Homeland Security, to install new computer hardware capable of monitoring computer…