BY ALANA LENTIN AND CO-SIGNATORIES This open letter was originally published on openDemocracy on November 5 and is republished here with permission from the author. A critical response to the Manifesto signed by over 100 French academics and published in the newspaper Le Monde on 2 November 2020, after the assassination of the school teacher, Samuel…
BY IRENE MULVEY AAUP president Irene Mulvey sent the following email to members on November 4, 2020: Election Day has passed, and, as expected, we are still awaiting the outcome while states continue to count ballots. The outcome of this election could have a profound impact on our nation, our local communities, and our campuses.…
BY HANK REICHMAN This past weekend the San Francisco Chronicle carried an article reporting that a white emeritus professor of economics at California State University, East Bay (CSUEB) — where I taught for twenty-five years before fully retiring in 2015 — “is teaching racist theories on intelligence. Students and faculty want him out.” A petition…
BY STEVEN LUBET Steven Lubet is Williams Memorial Professor and Director of the Bartlit Center for Trial Advocacy at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. A version of this post appeared at The Faculty Lounge on October 28. It was deeply objectionable when Zoom and other networking platforms blocked Leila Khaled’s webinars at San Francisco…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Readers of this blog may recall that shortly after the vice-presidential debate history professor Lora Burnett was hounded by trolls for Twitter comments that referred to Vice-President Pence as a “demon” and that her college administration buckled under the pressure to denounce her in a notorious October 12 statement. I blogged…
BY ASHLEY DENNIS This book review was originally published in Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), and is republished with their permission. As the U.S. reckons with systemic racism in the wake of global protests over the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, reparations for Black people has…
BY MARY A. HERMANN Research, personal experiences, and watching our academic mother colleagues navigate the COVID-19 pandemic inspired the article in the fall issue of Academe, “COVID-19, Academic Mothers, and Opportunities for the Academy,” that I coauthored with Cheryl Neale-McFall. We wrote the article late last spring when we were optimistic about the length of…
BY THE AAUP On October 28, the AAUP sent a letter to New York University president Andrew Hamilton to express concern about the cancellation by Zoom of an October 23 event hosted by the NYU chapter of the AAUP and co-sponsored by NYU departments and institutes. The text of the letter appears below. Dear President…
BY BENJAMIN BALTHASER AND BILL V. MULLEN As US colleges and universities were preparing to reopen their doors in August, we wrote in our fall 2020 Academe article, “The Necroliberal University,” that the reopening reflected a “necroliberal” consensus among university administrators that the benefits of a return to normalcy—and fiscal solvency—outweighed the risks of the…
BY JEFFREY SOMMERS A half century back, as noted in the fall 2020 Academe article I coauthored, “A Marshall Plan for Rebuilding Higher Education,” the United States began its retreat from public investments that had originally made it the world’s premier power. No longer wishing, or even thinking it possible, to retain its position of…