BY CATHRYN BAILEY I was sitting in my high school French class the first time I got called to the principal’s office. I don’t recall what the “controversial” newspaper story was about, but we student journalists explored issues such as drunk driving, race relations, and graduation requirements. I don’t even remember if I had actually…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Former homeland security secretary and Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, who earlier this year stepped down as president of the University of California system after seven years and retreated to a faculty position in the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, has joined the Board of Zoom, the company announced…
BY FACULTY, STAFF, AND STUDENTS AT US JESUIT COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES We, the faculty, staff and students of Jesuit Colleges and Universities from throughout the United States, are concerned by the rash of austerity-driven layoffs, firings and program eliminations occurring and under consideration by Jesuit institutions across the United States. These measures are particularly troubling…
BY DONNA MURCH Tonight Rutgers AAUP-AFT will hold the first session of a new initiative we’ve been working on for months. In the tradition of Ella Baker, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the 1960s civil rights movement, we are setting up a Freedom School for political education and outreach. Our first event on Thursday,…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH This is the first in a series of posts attempting to articulate lessons from the last decade of polarization. The series is entitled “What Have We Learned?” but I’m keenly aware that the “we” is highly ambiguous and mostly fictional. We are not one group and there is no consensus on…
BY JOHN K. WILSON I have an essay posted today at the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) blog about a particularly disturbing case at Kent State University where state legislators are explicitly threatening millions of dollars in state funding unless the university bans a textbook that offended the Republican politicians. Here are…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On October 28, the AAUP sent a letter, signed by President Irene Mulvey and me, to New York University president Andrew Hamilton urging him to address the academic freedom concerns raised by Zoom’s censorship of an event sponsored by the NYU AAUP and others. On November 6, we received the following…
BY IRENE MULVEY The following letter from AAUP president Irene Mulvey was emailed to AAUP members on November 10: The voters have spoken. Unprecedented voter turnout has affirmed the strength of our democracy. Like others who value education and truth, science and facts, Black lives and human rights, we breathed a collective sigh of relief…
BY DAVID A. VAREL These days, as any job seeker will tell you, universities are prioritizing diversity on their faculties. The way they are conceptualizing it has expanded dramatically over time, now including not only race and gender but also sexual orientation, disability, military service, and many other categories. Yet one omission is especially striking:…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In 2016, right after the Presidential election, I wrote on this blog: Nobody has a crystal ball but given the president-elect’s words and acts during the campaign—not to mention his seedy experiment in higher education—we would be fools not to expect an attack on the liberal institutions of shared governance and academic…