Below is a Sept. 2 letter (read the full letter with footnotes here) from Katherine M. Franke, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University, to UIUC Chancellor Phyllis Wise. Dear Dr. Wise: Last June several University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty invited me to your campus as part of The Cultures of…
This is a guest post by Adria Battaglia, a contributor to the newest issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom. Professor Battaglia received her PhD in rhetoric and language from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010. She served as a visiting professor at Illinois College for one year before returning to Texas to join the…
In an e-mail sent today by UA Outreach, President Pat Gamble announced his request that the University of Alaska Board of Regents revisit the $320,000 bonus decision. The Board of Regents is planning to meet in executive session on September 8 to consider Gamble’s request, according to the news release. Thanks to all of you…
An interesting court decision involving faculty intellectual property came down last week. The Missouri Court of Appeals Western District ruled on August 26 that The University of Missouri System does not have to release course syllabi because they are protected by copyright laws. The ruling upheld a previous lower court decision. According to the appeals…
UPDATE: This report may not be accurate. English professor Ted Underwood just tweeted: Regret to say that last night’s report from students appears premature. Faculty have since met with Wise, & report no change in position. University of Illinois student Stephanie Skora reports back on a meeting that a group of students had with Chancellor…
Here are two items related to Labor Day that I thought might be of interest. The first article is from Diane Ravitch’s blog and titled “Labor Day 2014.” Here is the opening of that post: “I recently saw photographs of John F. Kennedy giving a Labor Day speech in New York City during his…
Richard Vedder, an emeritus economist at Ohio University, has recently released another study showing the benefits of “right to work” legislation. In a newspaper interview, he has predicted that Ohio will adopt “right to work” legislation in 2015. Vedder has, of course, long been on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute; so, despite his…
In late July, Kris Olds wrote a piece for Inside Higher Ed’s Blog U: Global Higher Ed titled “Why No MOOCs on Gaza?” [The complete article is available at: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/why-no-moocs-gaza] Rightly recognizing that the MOOC format would be perfectly suited to providing succinct overviews of the conflicts in the world’s hotspots, Olds searched sites of…
You may have missed this item published by Inside Higher Ed in late July. Written by Colleen Flaherty, the article confirms Aaron Barlow’s earlier post to this blog that bias against hillbillies may be one of the last widely accepted and largely unchallenged biases in this country. Here are the first two paragraphs of Flaherty’s…
The Oakland College Has Been Very Progressive on the Rights of Transgender Students but Not on Collective-Bargaining Rights or Adjunct-Faculty Rights In a very recent post, I commented on Mills College’s becoming the first single-gender institution to admit transgender students [https://academeblog.org/2014/08/26/mills-college-becomes-the-first-single-gender-college-to-admit-transgender-students/]. The college’s progressivism on that issue, however, seems to stand in fairly stark…