Jon Husted, who has done more than any secretary of state outside of Florida and North Carolina to restrict voting opportunities, is running ads touting his efforts to insure that all military personnel have had the opportunity to vote. Husted’s efforts to restrict early voting and to disqualify provisional ballots just ahead of the 2012…
Guest blogger Michael Behrent is an associate professor of history at Appalachian State University and President of the ASU Chapter of the AAUP. This was first published as a letter-to-the-editor of The Appalachian. College is one of the most thrilling times of your life: a time to learn, discover yourself, and forge lifelong relationships. If this is…
In his New York Times column today, David Brooks examines a Lewis Mumford essay from 1940. Brooks also writes of “Those who threaten civilization — Stalin then, Putin and ISIS now” and he says that Mumford was examining “liberals’ tendency, in 1940, to hang back in the central conflict of the age, the fight against totalitarianism.” There’s a…
The Campus Faculty Association of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was an early advocate of an American Association of University Professors investigation of the university’s administration. Throughout the Steven Salaita viewpoint-cleansing assault on academic freedom, CFA has sustained an impressive advocacy in support of academic freedom and shared governance. One of the benefits in being engaged in AAUP matters, is the…
By Michael Rothberg [An earlier and shorter version of these remarks was first presented at the forum “Academic Freedom and Political Dissent,” which was sponsored by Illinois Faculty for Academic Freedom and Justice and took place on September 18, 2014 in Urbana’s Independent Media Center. The forum featured a lecture by Katherine Franke from Columbia Law School about…
InsideHigherEd today features an essay I wrote about Kenneth Howell, an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois who was fired, and then re-hired, in 2010, after a complaint about an email he sent to his Catholicism class which included some rather bizarre anti-gay views. Last month, I wrote about a white supremacist who is a…
Three weeks ago I posted to this blog a piece I titled “And Now There’s a Blacklist?” In that post I reported that an organization called the AMCHA Initiative, which claims it is “dedicated to investigating, documenting, educating about, and combating antisemitism at institutions of higher education in America,” had published what was “perilously close”…
By Jillian York, Director for International Freedom of Expression, Electronic Frontier Foundation Plenty has been written on the unceremonious “un-hiring” of Steven Salaita, a professor who gave up tenure at Virginia Tech to take a more suitable position at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The revocation of Salaita’s job offer—a day before he was set…
I had originally begun politely with a news hook quoting William J. Bennett on the common core, and will return to it, but as things are in our society, I think the following will give the common core more publicity: As reported by Eric Owens, education editor of The Daily Caller, in “Common Core is…
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure is apparently investigating the Steven Salaita case. What will be achieved is unclear since the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, the highest unit an appointee can appeal a dismissal on campus, has already cast its unseemly vote to dismiss the professor eleven…