BY DISARM PSU At Portland State University, students, faculty, staff, and our broader community have been engaged in seven years of organizing, protesting, and collaborating under an umbrella coalition called “Disarm PSU” since the 2014 decision by PSU to transform its Campus Public Safety Office (CPSO) into a sworn and armed police force. While many…
BY THE CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY HISTORY DEPARTMENT Responding to President Donald Trump’s September 17 attack on history that is not “patriotic”, and in particular, the “1619” feature in the New York Times, the Chapman University History Department decided to go public with their reply, posting it to The Panther, the university’s student newspaper. Under the heading,…
BY JOHN K. WILSON This week the College Free Speech Survey was released, which was developed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the conservative website RealClearEducation, and the research firm College Pulse, and funded by the Charles Koch Institute. It is being marketed as the largest survey ever conducted of students about…
BY J. MOUFAWAD-PAUL Alain Badiou once remarked that philosophy was “democratic” insofar as anyone is capable of critical thinking, but “undemocratic” because the pursuit of truth is not the same as voting according to one’s subjective opinion. In my opinion, this position is the basis for critical thinking and critical scholarship––anyone is capable of critical…
BY NAN ENSTAD Nearly every day there is bad news about draconian cuts to a college or a university system as the economic emergency prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic compounds decades of crisis in higher education in the United States. We can expect such cuts to continue and worsen unless we change course in how…
BY IRENE MULVEY AAUP president Irene Mulvey issued the following statement on September 29. I write to you today, as voter registration deadlines fast approach, with an urgent call to action. These are extraordinary times and much is at stake. Since its founding in 1915, the AAUP has never endorsed a candidate for office or…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) was published on September 27. We all recognize that this is an extraordinarily difficult time for everyone in higher education. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to increased costs, yet state support is being cut back and enrollments…
BY JACK C. LANE Rollins College’s embrace of AAUP principles and subsequent removal from the AAUP’s list of censured institutions in 1939 brought an end to a crisis at the college that had begun in 1933 with the dismissal of Professor John Rice and eleven other faculty members, an episode discussed in my article for…
BY HANK REICHMAN If you weren’t familiar with Zoom before the COVID-19 pandemic, you must be now. Everyone is using it — for faculty and staff meetings, seminar talks and panels, political and union organizing, socializing with friends and family, holding remote weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, and, of course, teaching online classes. And, yes, we’re…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week John Wilson posted on this blog a piece about how “an event at San Francisco State University was banned by leading tech giants after a campaign to censor it.” If you have not read John’s post, please do so now; this is an incredibly important issue. As John…