POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The letter below, which has so far attracted over 700 signatures, a veritable who’s-who of Jewish and Israel Studies, comes in response to the University of Washington placing its five-year-old Israel Studies Program on hold after a major donor, angry about a professor’s criticism of Israel, took her money back. Becky…
BY EVA CHERNIAVSKY As we enter a fourth decade of life in the neoliberal university, where permanent austerity rules everywhere except in the swelling ranks of upper administration; where the pretense of shared governance has all but collapsed; where tenure lines are vanishing (particularly in the humanities and social sciences), and the faculty continues to…
BY AMY HAGOPIAN AND EVA CHERNIAVSKY Recent news reports confirm what we’ve suspected: hate crimes in the U.S. are up. (Hate crimes are those crimes that target people based on their race, religion, sexuality, disability, or national origin.) Last July, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) reported more than 940 potential bias incidents targeting Muslims just during…
BY ALAN-MICHAEL WEATHERFORD This is a cross-post of an editorial by Alan-Michael Weatherford. It originally appeared as a guest editorial on the website of The Daily, the student newspaper of the University of Washington. The Daily Editor’s Note: Story includes vulgarity, anti-gay, and transphobic slurs. When internet hate-monger and Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopolous spoke on University of…
Sometime between October 15-18, the office of Dr. Angelina Godoy, Director of the University of Washington (UW) Center for Human Rights, was broken into and her desktop computer and a hard drive containing sensitive information about a recent lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency were stolen. Godoy reported that the hard drive contained “about 90…
In the new issue of Academe, Bruce Burgett argues that for public universities in states like Washington, the temptation to privatize is becoming overwhelming. He writes: Given the rise of market-based models in educational policy circles, the threat of the current moment is that the economic stress public institutions are experiencing will lead them to…