According to the Champaign, Illinois News-Gazette, Steven G. Salaita has accepted a position with the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. See here. Most academics rarely recover from a summary dismissal, particularly when ethical and moral sentiments are expressed that induce controversy. Perhaps, the national attention that this tenure travesty generated may have facilitated this positive development,…
The US Supreme Court will hear the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, where some anti-union high school teachers are trying to avoid paying an agency fee to the union that represents them, as part of the so-called “right to work” campaign. Let’s ignore for a moment the devastating effects such a ruling against…
An article on Inside Higher Ed today, on the threat to faculty unions through a case on its way to the Supreme Court, includes this: “If the Supreme Court rules that ‘fair share’ violates the First Amendment rights of public employees, they would transform the entire public sector into right to work, more appropriately named ‘right to…
British scholar Sara Ahmed writes in The New Inquiry (with a slightly earlier and very little different version on her own blog, feministkilljoys) an essay entitled “Against Students.” She starts out: What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position…
Earlier this month a student at Crafton Hills College, a community college in the Los Angeles area, and her parents urged the institution to ban several graphic novels. They complained about four works: Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel; YY: The Last Man, Vol. 1, by Brian Vaughan; The Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll’s House, by…
What follows is a news release disseminated this week by the Department of Labor. _________________________ Federal enforcement effort finds more than 3,000 Gulf Coast workers owed nearly $3.5 million in back wages by staffing agencies. US Labor Department determines agencies illegally paid wages as per diem reimbursement. NEW ORLEANS — Six Gulf Coast staffing agencies have…
Education, Inc., is a forthcoming documentary film about how money and politics are changing our schools. It will premiere on Friday, August 14, 2015. Here is the promotional description from the website for the documentary: “American public education is in controversy. As public schools across the country struggle for funding, complicated by the impact of…
The AAUP focuses on academic freedom issues within the United States. Scholars at Risk, an organization based at New York University, focuses on attacks on academic freedom elsewhere in the world—most of which involve actual physical attacks. According to Free to Think, a new report issued by Scholars at Risk as part of its Academic…
The News-Gazette of Champaign, Illinois published yesterday in its Sunday edition an op-ed I wrote on my interpretation of the American Association of University Professors censure of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The censure resulted from the summary dismissal of Associate Professor Steven Salaita for his tweets on the war in Gaza last summer. The paper supplied the…