This is a guest post by Steve Harris, a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science who has taught at Saint Louis University for twenty years. He recently became president of the SLU chapter of AAUP. Father Lawrence Biondi, president of Saint Louis University, is widely recognized, off and on campus, as having constructed, over the…
It certainly wasn’t Obama’s education policies that led me to support him. Between Obama and the Republicans there is little daylight. Both sides of our “great” political divide have fallen under the spell of the education “reformers,” the corporatists who want to wrest control of education (and education dollars) from the public sector, making it…
Dr. Brian C. Mitchell is the retired president of Bucknell University and former president of Washington & Jefferson College. He is the president of Brian Mitchell Associates and director of the Edvance Foundation. He can be reached at: bmitchell@edvancefoundation.org A great number of us within the higher ed community are watching with interest the developments in…
The following is a statement to the City Colleges of Chicago Board of Trustees meeting on Nov. 1 by Sheldon Liebman of Wright College.
A powerful letter from a teacher in North Carolina appeared recently on Diane Ravitch’s blog. Many of us who work in higher education, when we read it, wring our hands and think, “There but for the grace of God go I.” But it might be that we should not be sending to know for whom…
At the AAUP Shared Governance Conference this past weekend, I listened to quite a few panelists talk about the importance of the Faculty Senate as a vehicle for shared governance in our colleges and universities. I won’t go into detail on the panels right now, only saying that I hope to convince many of those…
Erica Goldberg, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Penn State Law School, has started a new blog about liberty and legal issues. She and I engaged in a back-and-forth discussion in the comments on her first post about the meaning of liberty and its application to restrictive student organizations. And I wanted to let everyone know…
On June 29, 2012, the administration at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) in Chicago shut down the student-run broadcast radio station, WZRD, and banned the student DJs from the airwaves. It was an act of censorship without due process that ignored NEIU’s policies, violated the First Amendment, and broke a state law protecting freedom of college…
At the end of an article of his published yesterday in The New York Times, Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) says: Students can’t learn how to navigate democracy and engage with their fellow citizens if they are forced to think twice before they speak their mind. Well… actually they can, and…
Wayne Lanter retired from Southwestern Illinois College and wrote a book about his 25 years of experience with union battles at one of the most important sites of faculty labor activism. Lanter’s book, Defending the Citadel, details the ups and downs of these labor fights. John K. Wilson interviewed Lanter via email for Academe Blog…