BY HANK REICHMAN Responding earlier this month on this blog to an article by Professor Stephen Gavazzi, I noted the growing tendency of governing boards — and, in the public sector, legislatures and the governors who usually appoint those boards — “to tilt the scales against the faculty and, arguably, against the common interest of…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Ten years ago, Joel O’Dorisio was campaigning for a faculty union at Bowling Green State University. Ten years later, he has been campaigning to be the next State Senator for Ohio’s 2nd District. Some political candidates “talk the talk” of support for public education and labor, but BGSU Art Professor Joel…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Consider the following items: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the largest schools in the country to bring students to campus for in-person teaching, said Monday that it will pivot to all-remote instruction for undergraduates after testing showed a pattern of rapid spread of the novel coronavirus. The…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Last week, John C. Eastman , Professor of law at Chapman University and senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, posted an op-ed on the Newsweek web page arguing that Sen. Kamala Harris is not a natural-born citizen and hence ineligible for the presidency since her parents were not citizens at the…
BY JOHN K. WILSON If anyone thinks freedom of the press is safe on college campuses, two stories this week from FIRE suggest otherwise. At the University of North Texas, a right-wing nonprofit group called Empower Texas filed a Freedom of Information Act request, demanding that the university force its student newspaper to turn over…
BY MARTIN KICH What follows is a Facebook post that is apparently being shared fairly widely: Is there someone out there who can tell me what our end game is with the Rona? What is the magic formula that is going to allow us to sound the all clear? Is it zero cases? The only…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Introducing the Fall 2019 issue of Academe devoted to academic freedom around the world, I wrote that “Scholarship today is global. . . . Threats to scholarship outside the United States inevitably affect scholarship here.” The opposite is also true. Threats by the Trump administration against international scholars in the U.S.…
BY EDWIN BATTISTELLA Like many universities, mine has an annual faculty report, which goes to the chair, the division director, and the provost. Today, the reports are electronic rather than typed, but during the nearly four decades I have taught at various universities, the basic categories in the reports have remained: teaching, scholarship, and service.…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a letter sent August 12 to Robert C. Robbins, President of the University of Arizona, by US Senators Richard J. Durbin (D-IL) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH). Footnotes have been converted to hyperlinks. Dear President Robbins: We write today regarding University of Arizona’s (UA) bid to…
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…