BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this month the Trump administration instructed federal agencies to end racial sensitivity trainings that address topics like white privilege or employ critical race theory, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda.” In response, AAUP President Irene Mulvey issued a statement that deemed the move “a naked attempt to politicize our national reckoning with…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS), a Canadian conservative advocacy group for academic freedom, issued a letter denouncing last week’s Scholar Strike. I believe the SAFS argument is wrong on two points, first when it claims that when universities support political activity, they are violating the academic freedom of students…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following open letter was published today in The Guardian. Dear Joe Biden, We write to you as the first generation made worse-off because of higher education. Student debt is a national crisis that destroys lives, drags down the economy and fuels the racial wealth gap. No one should be forced…
BY HUEY-LI LI In the middle of World War II, the AAUP published its oft-quoted 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure in order to “promote public understanding and support of academic freedom and tenure and agreement upon procedures to ensure them in colleges and universities.” In response to the outbreak of the…
BY STEVEN LUBET Best known as an essayist and short-story writer, and former editor of The American Scholar, Joseph Epstein retired in 2002 after 30 years in the English Department at Northwestern University. As an emeritus lecturer, however, he still receives university announcements, which recently led him to complain about a decline in teaching standards.…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This color-coded map indicating the proportionate number of votes for each state was created for a detailed article published by the New York Times. A somewhat more up-to-date by conventional map has been produced by Axios: The following table has also been created by Axios, and the article that includes…
BY ERNST BENJAMIN Just as Kenneth S. Stern was completing his new book, The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate, he discovered that President Trump had signed an executive order adopting the “working definition of anti-semitism” and making it applicable to enforcement of the Civil Rights Act Title VI. Stern warns that the…
BY SUE RAMLO I am on the faculty “Hit List” at the University of Akron (UA), about which I have now authored three Academe blog posts (They said they were sorry; Being on the Hit List; Hit List Who are We). Because, in the administration’s eyes, I am not currently employed by UA, I no…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday AAUP President Irene Mulvey issued a statement condemning President Trump’s attack on critical race theory as “a naked attempt to politicize our national reckoning with racism and a new escalation in the assault on expert knowledge.” This was not, however, Trump’s only such attempt. Less than 48 hours after tweeting that…
BY HANK REICHMAN Two webinars in which I had the pleasure and privilege of participating are now available to view as video recordings on the web. Here is the first, originally scheduled as a live presentation at the annual conference of the National Center for for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and…