BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN Years ago a colleague scolded me for saying that UNC employees can’t have a union. Yes, they can, he said; it’s collective bargaining that’s proscribed. Rudy Fichtenbaum, national president of the AAUP, reminded us of that message this past weekend at the annual meeting of the North Carolina state AAUP conference, attended…
BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN In late March 2019 at UNC–Chapel Hill, the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East and Islamic Studies held a conference titled “Conflict over Gaza: People, Politics and Possibilities.” The list of scholars, journalists, performers, artists, and films can be found here. On the first night of the conference, Tamer Nafar, a rapper, actor,…
POSTED BY KELLY HAND In a new op-ed* in the Wall Street Journal, Jay Smith, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, comments on reforms to college basketball recently proposed by Condoleeza Rice and her NCAA-appointed Commission on College Basketball. He is skeptical about the commission’s recommendations to address corruption because they…
BY JAY SMITH My article in the current issue of Academe, “Academic Freedom, Meet Big-Time College Sports,” tells a story about academic censorship. It provides a blow-by-blow account of the process whereby deans in the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill intervened in departmental course scheduling in order to prevent the teaching of…
BY MICHAEL C. BEHRENT On Defending UNC-Law School’s Civil Rights Center Against a Political Attack North Carolina has, in recent years, been subject to increased political meddling in its higher education system. After the attack on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Poverty Center, the Board of Governors has now trained its sights…
BY MICHAEL C. BEHRENT Interviewer Michael C. Behrent of Appalachian State University is vice president of the AAUP’s North Carolina state conference. Several months ago, something strange happened to Jay Smith, a tenured professor in UNC-Chapel Hill’s History Department: he found out that his dean made his chair cancel a class he had been scheduled…