Yesterday, the Kansas Board of Regents adopted a new policy requiring all state universities to target social media, in retaliation for David Guth’s tweets (see my previous defense). In one mindless decision, the Kansas Regents have instantly adopted one of the worst campus speech codes ever seen in the entire country. This policy is clearly…
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis drew upon his prominence as the first American recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature to issue a national warning against the dangers of fascism. Huey Long was emerging as a likely candidate in the 1936 presidential election, and in the satiric novel It Can’t Happen Here, Lewis provided an extended…
By Hank Reichman, First Vice-President and Chair, Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, AAUP This blog is not usually a forum for discussion of internal AAUP organizational matters, but Peter Kirstein’s thoughtful posting on the Boyle case at NEIU merits engagement by someone from AAUP’s elected leadership, as does the lengthy comment on that posting…
Here are some relatively recent headlines that I have collected: Former Al-Qaeda Barber Seized in Iraq American without Arab Roots Almosts Wins “Arabs Got Talent!” Andy Kauffman’s Brother Says He’s the Victim of a Hoax Biologists Use Cannons to Capture and Tag Endangered Birds Celebrating the Holidays behind Bars China to Send Pig Sperm to…
An AAUP report this month on the case of John Boyle (see more about it in the post by Peter Kirstein earlier today), an assistant professor of linguistics at Northeastern Illinois University, raises once more the problem of using the vague term “collegiality” in questions of the granting of tenure. The NEIU president, an AAUP…
Today, the AAUP released its report on Northeastern Illinois University dealing with the tenure case of John Boyle. Peter N. Kirstein of the Illinois AAUP comments on the process in this case. By Peter N. Kirstein, St. Xavier University One of the unresolved structural problems within the AAUP is the relationship between State Conferences’ Committee A…
Recently, the New Statesman ran a short piece on a study that tracked the majors of millionaires by the baccalaureate and graduate degrees that they have completed [http://www.newstatesman.com/business/2013/10/top-ten-university-degrees-taken-millionaires]. The ten most popular degrees among this select group were reported as follows: 1. Engineering 2. MBA 3. Economics 4. Law 5. Business Administration
In August 2013, Tim Murphy at Mother Jones described the sinkhole at Bayou Corne as “the biggest ongoing disaster in the United State that you haven’t heard of.” That was already a year after the sinkhole had first appeared. Writing for the Daily Kos, Jen Hayden offered the following overview: “One night in August 2012,…
The Board of Regents at Texas A&M have selected Mark Hussey as Interim President of the University System. Hussey has served as a Vice Chancellor at the institution and as Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Governor Rick Perry, an alumnus of the Texas A&M, had expressed his preference for another candidate…
Some one once asked me what a president does all day. They thought, like so many others, that presidents held out tin cups traveling the world searching for alumni with money. I replied that presidents are better thought of as King Solomon determining how to divide the baby. They behave most days as nineteenth century…