BY HANK REICHMAN Faculty members at Florida International University (FIU) are asking some tough questions about the university’s employment of GOP presidential hopeful Sen. Marco Rubio. At a Faculty Senate meeting last month senators fired question after question about Rubio’s teaching position to University Provost Ken Furton. David Park, associate professor in Advertising and Public…
BY HANK REICHMAN A controversial set of policies governing tenure at University of Wisconsin System schools that may threaten academic freedom were endorsed without debate Friday by a Board of Regents committee. “I’m stunned,” UW-Madison professor David Vanness, President of the UW-Madison AAUP, said of the swift approval. “I wonder whether due diligence is being…
I just came across the following description of the closing of Corinthian Colleges, written in May 2015 by Lawrence Biemiller for The Week: _________________________ Corinthian Crumbles In classical architecture, Corinthian is the most elaborate of the orders, recognizable by the acanthus leaves carved into column capitals. In higher education, however, Corinthian is a company accused…
BY MARTIN KICH In a post to this blog in December, I reported on the decision by the Board of Trustees of Eastern Michigan University (EMU) to continue the university’s involvement in the Education Achievement Authority (EAA) that Governor Snyder’s administration created ostensibly to “save” Detroit’s “failing” public school system. That decision was made in…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, has written a detailed 11,000-word theoretical account of what academic freedom means. In response, I want to examine some of his arguments in detail, although I don’t have time and space to address every point. But fundamentally, I think Wood takes academic…
BY MARTIN KICH On January 26, AFEC-AAUP and the Visual and Media Arts department of Emerson College hosted Danny Ledonne, one of Emerson College’s most controversial graduates. Ledonne (‘04) spoke about artistic and academic freedom after a screening of his critically praised documentary film, Playing Columbine, which explores the controversy created by his video game, Super Columbine…
Lead image credit: Her Campus BY KELLY WILZ Fair warning: This blog is not going to be angry. It will not be written in all caps. There will be no vulgarity. And it probably won’t go viral. I don’t care. What I do care about is the fact I’ve read over 70+ articles in…
“Hindsight is 20/20. But Rand is an ophthalmologist.” —Republican consultant on the end of Rand Paul’s presidential bid
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…
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…