The following talk by Michael Rothberg, Head of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, was prepared for a Campus Faculty Association forum on shared governance and academic freedom at the University of Illinois in Urbana on February 13, 2015.…
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign faculty Senate has approved a resolution recommending that the administration “promptly” adhere to and implement the recommendations of the December 23, 2014 released Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure (CAFT) report on the Steven Salaita firing. The vote was 51-41 at the February 9, 2015 Senate meeting. We had…
The Center for Constitutional Rights has issued this “media advisory” concerning tomorrow’s lawsuit over open-records claims under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. The issue of donor influence on the Steven Salaita summary dismissal case is a key aspect of this struggle for academic freedom and academic due process. The battle for open records, under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, between the University…
The terrible murder of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, seemed, initially and superficially, an all-too mundanely tragic event: a long-festering dispute over parking spaces led a guy to kill his neighbors with a gun. On the surface, the only unusual detail seemed to be that the guy had killed three people. Usually…
All of these items have been distributed by Business Insider. Let’s start with a story about the unsuccessful attempt by SpaceX to land a rocket on an platform in the ocean [www.businessinsider.sg/spacex-rocket-crash-landing-vine-images-2015-2/]. Here is a photo of the crash: And here is the opening line of the article that immediately follows the photo: “SpaceX launched…
The following is the text of a letter to the Executive Committee of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, written by David Ransel, Robert F. Byrne Professor Emeritus of History at Indiana University, and signed by 126 134 142 additional scholars in the field. The complete list of signatories follows the text. …
One of the great battles ongoing in American higher education centers on the continued vitality and relevance of a liberal arts education. Nearly every American has seen some video variation of an underemployed liberal arts graduate at a fast food window asking: “Would you like biggie-sized fries with that?” Historically, the defense of the…
The decision of Marquette University to seek the revocation of the continuous tenure, an increasingly common oxymoron, of Associate Professor John McAdams merits academic freedom scrutiny. Whenever an administration seeks dismissal of a tenured faculty member, there is a categorical imperative to examine if academic freedom protection should prevail. An academic freedom inquiry, of course, can…
Bobby Jindal has jumped on the Sam Brownback/Scott Walker bandwagon and has cut taxes every year that he has been office. The problem is that he has not been able to cut spending as fast as he has been cutting taxes. The dramatic drop in oil and gas prices has cut deeply into one of…
Two recent posts to Diane Ravitch’s blog have provided links to responses to President Obama’s proposal to provide free community college. The first item is “The Trojan Horse of ‘Free’ Community College,” an op-ed published at Truthout [http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/28637-the-trojan-horse-of-free-community-college#]. It is written by Adam Bessie, a faculty member at a California community college whose personal blog…