POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN University of California at Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, who resigned last summer pending installment of a replacement (to be announced soon, it is said), has suffered the arrows of considerable criticism from his faculty, Bay Area media, and, to some extent, from me on this blog (e.g., here, here, and here). …
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The following post by UCLA history professor Michael Meranze is reposted by permission from the Remaking the University blog that he runs along with UC Santa Barbara professor Christopher Newfield. I have offered my own view of the Milo controversy at Berkeley in “On Milo’s Right to Speak.” The turmoil surrounding Milo…
BY HANK REICHMAN Remember that widely circulated map illustrating how in 39 of 50 states the highest-paid state employee is a public university football or basketball coach? If you don’t, here it is: According to USA Today‘s annual survey, in 2015-16 some 72 college football coaches were paid over a million dollars annually, not including…
BY HANK REICHMAN Public higher education is “dying” in the US, with the pricing out of students from poorer backgrounds amounting to a “national tragedy in the making.” So warned Robert Reich, chancellor’s professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and secretary of labor in the Bill Clinton administration, in a…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted excerpts from an op-ed piece about the search for a new UC Berkeley Chancellor published in the Daily Californian, the campus newspaper, by leaders of the Berkeley Faculty Association. They endorsed the Statement of Principles enunciated earlier in the week by the Council of University of California…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Earlier today, UC-Berkeley Dean Carla Hesse rescinded her Sept. 13 suspension of the DeCal course on Palestine. But the controversy over her original suspension remains a hotly contested debate. Dean Hesse writes, “I did not request or require any revisions of the content of the course,” a claim questioned by some…
The following letter from Dean Carla Hesse rescinds the suspension of the revised Palestine course at the University of California at Berkeley. BERKELEY: College of Letters & Science Office of the Deans 101 Durant Hall #2920 September 19, 2016 DEPARTMENT CHAIRS OF THE DIVISION OF SOCIAL SCIENCES DIVISIONAL COUNCIL OF THE ACADEMIC SENATE (UC…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN “We need a chancellor who will not be engaged in the doublespeak of proclaiming UC Berkeley’s preeminence as a public university while simultaneously insisting on marketizing every aspect of its existence. We need a chancellor who does not believe that the negative impact on educational access and the quality of our…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday I posted to this blog the text of a letter from UC Berkeley professors Michael Burawoy and Celeste Langan, co-chairs of the UC Berkeley Faculty Association (BFA), a partner organization of the AAUP, calling for a new probe of alleged abuses in the university’s intercollegiate football program. The request came after…
BY HANK REICHMAN A series of highly publicized sexual harassment scandals is not the only embarrassment facing the University of California at Berkeley. The university’s athletic program is also in the spotlight for abuse. A report yesterday by the San Francisco Chronicle revealed that a 2014 inquiry clearing coaches and trainers of employing abusive and…