Ben Carson, Academic Freedom, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Marty Kich has already blogged about GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson’s advocacy of campus censorship of free expression despite his shallow and hypocritical railing against the perils of “political correctness.” But I can’t resist piling on. Let’s recall that the retired right-wing neurosurgeon’s claim last week was that unlike other right-wing fanatics he doesn’t want…

House Science Committee Attacks Scientists

In a must-read article published yesterday on vox.com, David Roberts argues that “The House science committee is worse than the Benghazi committee.” “The Benghazi committee is not even the worst committee in the House,” Roberts contends. “I’d argue that the House science committee, under the chairmanship of Lamar Smith (R-TX), deserves that superlative for its…

Counting and Thinking

T. E. Hulme was an English thinker who achieved some notice during the decade before the First World  War, the conflict that would take his life. Though his positions would change over his short career (he was 34 when he died), Hulme was driven by the tensions between the individual and the community and between…

University Endowments and Student Aid

In “OSU Fund Managers Pig Out: Scholarships Not Awarded to Students,” an article published by the Columbus Free Press, John Lasker has focused on Ohio State University’s growing endowment and on the degree to which those assets are benefitting the students who attend the university. Here are some of the relevant facts, culled from Lasker’s…

AAUP Supports Campus Equity Week

Today launches Campus Equity Week, during which groups plan local actions to draw attention to working conditions of faculty. Campus Equity Week is an annual event started by the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, a grassroots coalition of activists in North America working for contingent faculty: adjunct, part-time, non-tenured, and graduate teaching faculty working to bring greater awareness…

University of Phoenix Loses Military Students

Earlier this month, Business Insider reported that Apollo Education Group, the for-profit education company that operates the University of Phoenix, “is getting destroyed” on the stock market. Dawn Bilodeau, Chief of the Defense Department’s Voluntary Education Program, had released the following statement: “The institution will not be authorized access to DoD installations for the purposes…

Politicized Secret Appointments Fuel Bogus Financial "Crises"

Recently we’ve seen a growing amount of attention paid to secret searches for university presidents and the appointment as a consequence of such searches of non-educators who may push a corporatizing agenda, including at the University of Iowa, Miami University, and the University of North Carolina.  Last week David A. Sanders, Associate Professor of Biological…

CUCFA Letter to UC Regents’ Working Group on Intolerance Policy

Last month the Board of Regents of the University of California system debated a proposed “Statement of Principles on Intolerance” prompted by concerns about anti-Semitism on campus.  The proposal attracted considerable criticism (see also here) and instead the board announced plans to have a task force come up with a new document articulating the system’s…