Several weeks ago, I posted an item on the effort to turn three sites associated with the Manhattan Project into a National Park. The post was titled “This Is Where Great-Grandpa Helped to Build the Bomb,” and someone apparently employed by the National Park Service responded by characterizing the post as “uninformed” because, in his…
Dr Paul L. DeVito died suddenly and unexpectedly over the weekend of August 22-23, 2015. He had been provost at Saint Xavier University for two years. During his tenure, many witnessed a recrudescence of morale on campus, and an extraordinary commitment to academic freedom, shared governance and faculty activism. He was the greatest administrator I…
Academic freedom is something we talk about a lot these days, what with Salaita and Dreger and Wisconsin and all. Less often talked about is the academic freedom of the new faculty majority. When contingent faculty’s academic freedom is talked about, it’s talked about as if precarity were the only obstacle to untrammeled academic autonomy,…
Over the Labor Day weekend, most signatories of the “Faculty Statement on Narendra Modi’s Visit to Silicon Valley” received threats from individuals in South Africa and Canada and email harassment from the Hindu Vivek Kendra, a Hindu nationalist organization affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) of which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a member. Several letter signatories have also been targeted…
Barragan, James. “’Ask a Mexican’ Columnist to Keynote UT’s Hispanic Month.” Austin American-Statesman [TX] 14 Sep. 2015: B, 1. Gustavo Arellano, the writer behind the nationally syndicated column “Ask a Mexican” and the book “Tacos USA,” which discusses how Mexican food penetrated American culture, will give the keynote speech Tuesday for the University of…
The proposed intolerance policy at the University of California is a badly written, repressive, and fundamentally misguided policy that any true university should be embarrassed to even consider adopting. Universities are free to express collective values so long as they do not seek to punish those who disagree. But they ought to be careful in…
In July, Hank Reichman posted a piece on “a 542-page study examining the involvement of the nation’s psychologists and their largest professional organization, the American Psychological Association (APA), in the harsh interrogations of the post-9/11 years, [a study that] ‘raises repeated questions about the collaboration between psychologists and officials at both the C.I.A. and the…
The following is an expanded version of a letter to the editor published last week in the Louisiana State University Daily Reveille. The author is LSU Professor of Physics and Astronomy A.R.P. (Ravi) Rau, who serves currently as President of AAUP’s Louisiana Conference and is a former president of the LSU AAUP chapter. The text…
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “The College Crossroads.” New York Times 13 Sep. 2015: M, 17. [The Education Issue] . . . As higher education expands its reach, it’s increasingly hard to say what college is like and what college is for. In the United States, where I now teach, more than 17 million undergraduates will…
Recently, I posted an item on Sarah Palin’s abuse of the English language, which included her observation that if immigrants don’t want to be stigmatized, they should start “speaking American.” Very coincidentally, later on that same day, I came across an item in the discussion list for the American Dialect Society that included a link…