BY NATHANIEL MILLS It has now been almost a year since then-President Jeff Ettinger of the University of Minnesota intervened to revoke the properly vetted job offer to Raz Segal to serve as faculty director of UMN’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. This decision was denounced by the UMN chapter and national leadership of…
BY HISTORIANS FOR PEACE AND DEMOCRACY This statement was issued by the steering committee of Historians for Peace and Democracy on January 31, 2025, and sent to its membership. “Who controls the present controls the past,” wrote George Orwell in 1949. Authoritarian regimes have long tried to rewrite history to advance their political objectives. The…
BY JENNIFER RUTH When Jan Haaken and I decided to make The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests?, we couldn’t know how events here—much less in Gaza and the West Bank—would unfold. We had been talking about a film about the suppression of academic freedom in Texas and pivoted when some of the…
BY VERONICA VALENCIA GONZALEZ For decades, universities have served as bastions of knowledge, advancing research and shaping the intellectual foundation of society. Yet, in their pursuit of cost-cutting measures, these same institutions have systematically devalued the very people responsible for that progress: the faculty. The suppression of wages for professors; the erosion of tenure; the…
BY THE NORTH CAROLINA CONFERENCE OF THE AAUP On February 5, the University of North Carolina System issued a memorandum to UNC chancellors announcing that “all general education requirements and major-specific requirements mandating completion of course credits related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or any other topic identified in Section VII of the [UNC System]…
BY JOHN TOMASI I like lamb vindaloo super hot and spicy. Or rather, as my family delights in pointing out, I like the idea of vindaloo prepared that way. In truth, when faced with a wildly overspiced vindaloo platter, I gasp and sputter, munch down every naan in reach, quaff all the water on the…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH The Coalition for Action in Higher Ed (CAHE) is mobilizing again this year for another Day of Action on April 17. Last year, more than 100 campuses participated in the Day of Action, holding events, rallies, viewing parties for the teach-in, and meetings to strategize. To bring campuses together simultaneously, CAHE…
BY FRANK RITTER ORCID is an ID number authors can request from a consortium, primarily created by for-profit publishers. It is nominally free and intended to be unique to individuals. It is designed to be a database primary key to tie all records of an individual together. Using ORCID is a conflict of interest because…
BY BETHANY LETIECQ, TIM GIBSON, AND JAMES FINKELSTEIN This blog post is the second in a series on the transformation of George Mason University’s board. Read part I here. From Conservative Oversight to Extreme Partisan Activism In recent years, George Mason University’s Board of Visitors (BOV) has dramatically transformed from conservative oversight to extreme partisan…
BY JAMES FINKELSTEIN, BETHANY LETIECQ, AND TIM GIBSON From Conservative Oversight to Extreme Partisan Activism Republican governors in Virginia have long appointed conservatives to university governing boards, but nowhere has this been more pronounced than at George Mason University. This trend began in July 1996, when Governor George Allen appointed Edwin Feulner, co-founder and president…