As American colleges and universities seek to refine, and in many cases rebrand, their student life experience, one of the questions that regularly arises on college campuses is whether there is a place for Greek life in the 21st Century. It’s a legitimate question, especially at those institutions that are working hard to differentiate themselves…
I have been chronicling the ever-increasing state budget deficit in Louisiana, Bobby Jindal’s ideologically doctrinaire and ineffectual attempts to find a solution to that deficit that does not involve raising any taxes, and the catastrophic impact that this situation will almost certainly have on Lousiana’s public colleges and universities. This past week Jindal floated another…
The First Item: David Brat who came to national prominence by defeating Eric Cantor in the GOP primary in 2014, despite being outspent by Cantor by a 40-1 margin. For the 18 years before that election, Brat had been a professor of economics at Randolph Macon College, for three years heading the college’s Moral Foundations…
Two days ago, on February 12, New York Times media columnist David Carr died suddenly while at work in the newspaper’s offices. His death received more national attention than it might otherwise have received because it occurred in a week when longtime CBS News journalist Bob Simon died in a car wreck in Manhattan, when…
The recently inaugurated Republican governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner, has signed an executive order banning public-employee unions from collecting fair-share contributions from those employees who choose not to belong to the unions that represent them. I very recently did a post on the very skewed logic behind “right to work” legislation—see https://academeblog.org/2015/02/07/right-to-work-provides-workers-with-many-rights/ Rauner, previously the…
The News–Gazette reported that Steven Salaita’s lawsuit against the University of Illinois will proceed. The University of Illinois had argued, since the lawsuit had been filed by the professor’s lawyers, the Center for Constitutional Rights (C.R.C.), and not specifically by Professor Salaita, that the plaintiff did not have legal standing. Judge Chase Leonhard, a Champaign County state judge, issued…
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…