Two additional documents are now available for those who have been following the controversy sparked by the refusal of the board of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) to accept funding for a dissertation fellowship program from eminent scholar Stephen F. Cohen and his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, because the program…
Guest blogger David Kaloustian is a professor of English and Modern Languages at Bowie State University in Maryland. An Unfortunately Chosen Metaphor I note that the White Paper (see 4.b. here), which formed the basis of the Board of Regent’s change of course for higher education begins the history of UMUC with a rather unfortunately…
Associate Professor of Political Science John McAdams released Dean Richard C. Holz’s, January 30, 2015, letter of dismissal. This is the redacted version of the letter of intent to seek a revocation of his continuous tenure. At the top of the document, Professor McAdams, in red letters, informs the reader of the redaction of just two “phrases.” “NOTE: Two phrases…
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.…