BY DAVID EIFLER AND MARGARET PHILLIPS When universities abruptly shut down in-person instruction in the spring, academic libraries followed suit. Librarians and other university front line workers applauded these decisions that prioritized the health and safety of staff during this unprecedented public health crisis. And libraries continued to fulfill many of their service missions in…
BY KAVITA DAIYA Just as university administrators, faculty, and students breathed a sigh of relief from the panic created by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) July 6 directive barring international students from the United States if their university chose to go online-only in the fall, ICE issued a new…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH What follows is a group statement from this coalition of AAUP chapters. As educators committed to the public good, we recognize our responsibility—on campus and off—to advocate for students and fellow workers made even more vulnerable during the pandemic. The global pandemic is aggravating deep, endemic inequities and racial disparities, including…
BY THE AAUP The AAUP’s Committee on Contingency and the Profession today issued the following principles and recommendations: Our world is today engulfed in the global COVID-19 pandemic, with enormous loss of life. The unemployment rate was 10.2 percent in July, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Many higher education institutions are preparing to…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Mary Grabar, a fellow at the right-wing Alexander Hamilton Institute, has written an essay praising Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) for introducing the Saving American History Act of 2020, “a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts.” This is…
BY MARTIN KICH Part 1 To stave off some of the assumptions and accusations that my previous posts on intercollegiate athletics have provoked, I want to make clear that for five decades, I have been an avid fan of college basketball and, although somewhat less enthused about college football, I have tuned into the games…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Pippa Norris of Harvard has an interesting new paper on the views of political scientists globally, “Closed minds? Is a ‘cancel culture’ stifling academic freedom and intellectual debate in political science?” It’s based on a global survey of political science professors, World of Political Science, 2019, in which scholars were asked:…
BY HANK REICHMAN Early today the following tweet from Professor Stephen Gavazzi, who teaches in the education school at Ohio State, came up on my Twitter timeline: A bit flattered to be asked my opinion, I quickly read the essay and concluded that given the restrictions of the Twitter format any response on that medium…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On August 7, I happened to read a syndicated column at FrontPageMag by Walter E. Williams, a legendary conservative intellectual and the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University. One paragraph shocked me: Leaders of ISIS and the Taliban have called the recent U.S. trend of angry…
BY BRANDON RODRIGUEZ Brandon Rodriguez is a native New Yorker whose family migrated from Puerto Rico. He grew up in the South Bronx and attends Guttman Community College, which is part of City University of New York (CUNY). This essay is reposted with permission from the Activist History Review blog. My world changed in early…