Every American school child knows or should know about the Salem witch trials, and part of that chapter of American history involves torture. Perhaps we should not torture our own citizens that overtly, but events as they transpired a few hundred years ago certainly represent American ingenuity so that an early form of water torture,…
Philosophy professor Joseph Levine argues in a New York Times blog that Steven Salaita was justified in violating standards of civility in a particular tweet about anyone who supports Israel during the attacks on Gaza being “an awful human being.” Levine defends Salaita against the charge of incivility on the grounds that he believes Salaita’s views to be…
“It need scarcely be pointed out that the freedom which is the subject of this report is that of the teacher,” says the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Freedom. The 1940 Statement follows up: Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their…
Thomas Frank, perhaps best known for What’s the Matter with Kansas?, an examination of America’s new conservatism, has an article in Salon, “The New Republic, the torture report, and the TED talks geniuses who gutted journalism.” Toward the end, he writes this: The new press lord’s deeds are all made possible by the shrinking significance of everyone…
The strike by graduate students at the University of Oregon lasted eight days and ended after a 22-hour marathon session with a mediator. Here the highlights of what the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation achieved in their new contract: 1. a 10% increase in wages over the next two years; 2. two weeks of flex time for medical…
Fred Shapiro, an associate director at Yale Law School’s library, has edited the Yale Book of Quotations since 2006. The book has been conceived as “the most accurate, most comprehensive, and most up-to-date major quotation dictionary”: “By using state-of-the-art research methods such as searching online collections of historical periodicals and books, the YBQ revolutionizes our…
At its idealistic best, the traditional vision of American higher education was one of beauty, dynamism and diversity. With undergraduate students able to take courses from as many as 40 different professors, with requirements designed to give as broad a taste of intellectual pursuits as possible, with “shared governance” assuring that corporate-style top-down influence is…
Walter Olson at Overlawyered (and reprinted at Minding the Campus) argues that the AAUP is hypocritical and left-wing in its approach to Freedom of Information Act requests. However, the evidence he offers simply doesn’t show this. According to Olson, in the case of Douglas Laycock, “the AAUP was quoted in the press talking in a…
When my father got out of the army at the end of WWII, one of the colleges he applied to was Oberlin. A good school, it wasn’t far from home; he knew very little more about it. As it happened, according to his story, one hundred other GIs had also applied–and the college suddenly had…
Getting to “know” other academics on Twitter is a very strange process. First you follow the ones you know. Then you follow the most interesting people who they “know,” and by then other folks who they follow who you don’t know have started following you. One of the people I’ve gotten to “know” through this…