The following passage is excerpted from a news report from The Hill: “For days, someone in the House had been editing multiple pages related to transgender issues that critics called ‘transphobic.’ The situation came to a head this week when the person changed the description of Orange Is the New Black actor Laverne Cox from…
Sinclair, Upton. World’s End. New York: Viking, 1940. Now known primarily for his muckraking fiction and journalism, in particular for his novel The Jungle, Upton Sinclair also produced a series of eleven espionage novels featuring an operative named Lanny Budd. What is most unusual about the series is that Sinclair sought to chronicle systematically…
Lil Taiz, President of the California Faculty Association, has shared the following information which should be of broad interest. The PBS NewsHour contacted the CFHE leadership about CFHE’s take on MOOCs and online higher education. The producers had seen CFHE’s video on the topic on the CFHE website and wanted to have “another perspective” about…
By Bill Ayers In mid-August the University of Illinois withdrew its appointment of Steven Salaita, formerly an English professor at Virginia Tech, as a tenured associate professorship at UIUC. Having cut his ties in Virginia (resignation from a tenured job, his spouse quitting her job, and the couple renting a house) Salaita was informed that…
This is the time of year when it has happened to many parents already and is about to happen to many more. The act of “dropping off” your child at college. Do you remember when it happened to you and you were the freshman? It was the early ’80s for me, and my father was…
This fall will mark a half-century since the Free Speech Movement (FSM) erupted on the University of California, Berkeley campus. “After decades of ambivalence, UC Berkeley is finally embracing this important part of its history,” writes longtime Bay Area newspaper columnist Martin Snapp in the summer issue of California, Berkeley’s alumni magazine. The FSM began…
The Maryland AAUP conference sent us this piece by Ned Balbo, who taught for twenty-four years in the writing department at Loyola University Maryland. In it, Balbo recounts how he lost his position because of new enforcement of a Loyola rule barring full-time non-tenure-track faculty members from reappointment to their existing position after six consecutive…
Last week, a group convened by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni issued a report examining the role of trustees in college and university governance. The report, titled “Governance for a New Era: A Blueprint for Higher Education Trustees,” suggested the trustees should take a more active role by establishing definable institutional metrics, promoting…
Inside Higher Ed has a lengthy story about the University of Illinois administration’s justifications for firing Steven Salaita. What’s really important about today’s story is this revelation that the top fundraising official at the University of Illinois Foundation had emailed Chancellor Phyllis Wise and other top U of I fundraisers, telling her “Dan, Molly, and…
In a major victory for faculty and staff and for reproductive rights more generally, the California Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) has reversed a previous decision to allow two Catholic universities to eliminate coverage of most abortions for employees, declaring that state law requires health insurance plans to cover all abortions. The state had previously…