The Chronicle: Thai Prime Minister Stirs Outrage With Denials of 1976 Massacre of Students
The new prime minister, who recently drew ire by scoffing at reports that 46 people had died in the incident, went before parliament on Monday to swear he had not been involved
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Posted in International
The Chronicle: Conservatives Just Aren’t Into Academe, Study Finds
Divergent life choices may explain the dearth of right-wing scholars
On Thursday mornings, a half-dozen faculty members from Pennsylvania State University’s campus here gather at Kuppy’s Diner to talk politics. Like most professors, all of those in the Kuppy’s gang are Democrats — all except Matthew Woessner, an assistant professor of public policy
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Posted in Faculty
Courier-Journal: Law School Is Sold and Owners Leave in Settlement With Students Who Sued
Students at Kentucky’s first for-profit law school have forced its owners to cease their role in the school’s operation and relinquish ownership.
In a settlement struck late yesterday in a lawsuit filed by more than 30 students at the American Justice School of Law in Paducah, the three owners of the school, including two deans, agreed to transfer ownership to an investors group headed by a local physician and to play no role in its future administration, said the students’ lawyer, Dennis Null.
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Posted in Corporate University
Arizona Daily Star: Bill: Guns the cure for school shootings
Unarmed students, teachers ‘sitting ducks,’ legislator says
PHOENIX — Sen. Karen Johnson said she believes the tragedy last week at Northern Illinois University would have been avoided, or at least would have been less tragic, if faculty members and students had been armed.
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Posted in Campus Life
The Guardian: Oxford and Cambridge fail to improve state school intake
Oxford and Cambridge universities are to overhaul their undergraduate recruitment strategies in recognition that they have failed to significantly increase the number of applicants from state schools.
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Posted in International
The Herald: University’s £1m plan to educate world’s poor
Glasgow University will offer a package of scholarships to some of the world’s poorest students as it marks the city’s status as host to the 2014 Commonwealth Games.
It is planned to support 53 students, one from every member state of the Commonwealth, with the largest bursaries going to the 14 students from the least developed countries. These include Pakistan, Uganda and Malawi.
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Posted in Economics
Inside Higher Ed: Communicating About David Horowitz
David Horowitz will not be appearing at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association, which is expected to draw thousands of professors to San Diego in November. On that fact, everyone is in agreement. But whether he isn’t participating because he was making unreasonable demands, because he was never invited in the first place, because the association gave in to members who didn’t want to give him a forum, or some combination of factors is the subject of much disagreement.
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Posted in Politics
Via the National Project to Defend Dissent and Critical Thinking in Academe:
Dangerous candidate for President of University of
Colorado:
Why should all faculty, students and staff be worried
about the near certainty that Bruce Benson will be
anointed the next President of the University of
Colorado? Why should all faculty, students and staff
mobilize to defeat his candidacy? Because he will
transform CU into the WalMart of higher education.
Because Bruce Benson is the wrong candidate, now, and
forever. Because CU can do much, much better.
Read the information below. Check out its accuracy if
you wish. Decide what you think. Then Please:
• Send this email to every CU faculty and staff member
or CU you know.
• Email or call the Regents.
• Email or call your state representatives.
• Email or call David Skaggs, the Colorado
Commissioner of Higher Education. David Skaggs, the
Colorado Commissioner of Higher Education.
• Email or call Governor Ritter.
ACT IMMEDIATELY.
THE REGENTS ARE SCHEDULED TO VOTE ON WEDNESDAY,
FEBRUARY 13TH, THE SAME DAY THAT BENSON WILL BE
VISITING THE CU-BOULDER CAMPUS. WE CANNOT WAIT TO
HEAR HIM AGAIN. ACTING THEN WILL BE TOO LATE.
1. BENSON HAS BEEN A MEMBER OF ACTA, AN ORGANIZATION
ON RECORD IN OPPOSITION TO SHARED GOVERNANCE AND
FACULTY RIGHTS. Bruce Benson is a member of ACTA’s
Trustee’s Council; he served as an ACTA (American
College Trustees and Alumni) Trustee at Smith College.
ACTA (Check out
http://www.goacta.org/about_acta/advisory.html) wants
to create more “flexible” and “responsive”
administrative structures by reducing the status (and
even eliminate the requirement of a PhD) of top
academic officers such as Deans, Department heads, and
even, perhaps, Provosts. This already has happened at
CU-Boulder; the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Diversity,
a post previously held by two tenured faculty members,
was filled by a non-academic without faculty rank. The
job description only required a BA degree. This
“flattened” hierarchical structure already is being
implemented Adams State and CSU, and it destroys the
link between faculty and their academic leaders. No
credible academic would take such a position without
such protection. It’s more or less how WalMart
operates. CU could be next.
2. BENSON HAS VIOLATED THE CONTRACTUAL RIGHTS OF
TENURED FACULTY. Upon his installation as President of
Metropolitan State University’s Board of Trustees, he
had the Faculty Handbook completely re-written without
discussion or consultation with the faculty. (The
person rumored to have done the job had previously
re-written the management guide for Quizno’s). In the
new Faculty Handbook, the RIF (Reduction in Force)
policy was changed so that in case of a financial
shortfall (not exigency), rank or tenure no longer
need be considered in decisions about elimination of
teaching positions. He then fired tenured faculty.
Metro faculty sued, and the case still is in the
courts. What would Benson do to further weaken
faculty rights and due process at CU?
3. BENSON COULD FURTHER DESTROY DUE PROCESS FOR
FACULTY AND STAFF: Already seriously under attack,
due process for faculty at CU has only a tenuous and
unenforceable toehold in the Faculty Handbook. That
Handbook is only “advisory” to the administration,
which does not have to abide by its policies. Benson
already has re-written at least one Faculty Handbook.
Hank Brown’s administration made major changes in it
as well—all to the detriment of faculty rights. What
steps would a President Benson take at CU?
4. BENSON HAS NO VISION. Benson’s ideas about CU’s
mission are more appropriate for a public school
system, a vocational school or a community college. It
isn’t just that Benson has only a BA degree, a lack of
qualifications entirely rare among University
Presidents. It’s that he has no intellectual or
scholarly appreciation for what scientists and
scholars do and the conditions needed for them to do
their work effectively.
5. BENSON DOES NOT UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CU’S
MOST IMPORTANT RESEARCH INITIATIVES. Benson is either
woefully unaware or refuses to acknowledge the impact
of the carbon cycle on Earth’s living systems. It was
embarrassing to hear Benson cite the National
Geographic and the local newspapers as authoritative
sources on climate change, and express skepticism
about the human role (now indisputable among
environmental sciences from all disciplines) in global
warming. How can he lead an institution that is
striving to be climate neutral when, at both the
student and faculty meetings, he claimed that humans
and plants emit CO2 into the atmosphere too? Does he
really think that, when it comes to carbon, humans and
plants are no different than cars and power plants?
How can he preside credibly over CU when he doesn’t
appear to believe in scientific initiatives for which
CU faculty shared a Nobel Prize this very year????
6. BENSON HAS NO APPROPRIATE EXPERIENCE. Benson knows
how to run an oil and gas exploration company. Not a
university. He understands corporate culture. He is
utterly uninformed about the culture and complexities
of how to run a Tier One University. His actions at
Metro were strictly corporate: Fire expensive
(full-time and tenured) employees with benefits and
replace them with cheap (part-time and contingent)
employees without benefits. It’s WalMart all over
again. We can expect the same kinds of “cost saving”
actions if he becomes CU President.
7. BENSON’S CLAIM THAT HE WOULD LEAVE ACADEMIC MATTERS
TO THE CAMPUS CHANCELLORS IS NOT COMFORTING. Not given
ACTA’s agenda for reorganizing universities.
Chancellors are appointed by the University President;
nothing would stop Benson from firing the current
administrators and replacing them with people
sympathetic to ACTA’s agenda.
8. BENSON’’S STATEMENTS ABOUT ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN THE
CLASSROOM AND RESEARCH ARE NOT CREDIBLE. When he
says—as he did at we need “sensible” research and
professors who teach “what they are supposed to teach”
in their classes) too closely resembles David
Horowitz’s rhetoric about “balance” in teaching. For
ACTA and Horowitz, those words are simply cover terms
for conservative hegemony.
9. BENSON HAS A RECORD OF DIVISIVE PARTISANSHIP. His
Trailhead Organization spent $200,000 on negative and
false attack campaigning against rancher Wes McKinley,
state representative from SE Colorado and leader of
opposition to the US Military takeover of the Pinon
Canyon area. Despite his promises to abandon
Republican party activity, it’s unlikely that his
modus operandi in dealing with opposition and dissent
will change.
10. BENSON’S RECORD OF SUPPORT FOR WOMEN IS POOR. He
contributed at least $1000 to the defense fund of
Senator Robert Packwood, who was accused—and
convicted—of harassing and assaulting more than 20
women while in office. At meetings on campus, his only
comment was that “everyone is entitled to a defense.”
True enough, but given CU’s egregious record for
protecting sexual harassers in the past, it doesn’t
need another President who covers up and stonewalls
for predators.
11. BENSON DOES NOT HAVE SUFFICIENT SUPPORT AMONG
FACULTY, STUDENTS, STAFF AND THE REGENTS. A firestorm
of protest already has erupted against both the
process by which Benson was chosen, and his candidacy
itself. Three current and one former (Jim Martin)
Regent have openly opposed Benson for President of CU.
The Benson Presidency is being forced upon a
University system that seems dead set against him, and
humiliated not only by the fact that the Regents
didn’t want to support anyone more qualified, but by
being ignored.
Margaret LeCompte, PhD
Professor of Education
Member, Academic Freedom Group
President, CU-Boulder AAUP Chapter
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Posted in Administration
From the National Committee to Defend Dissent and Critical Thinking in Academia:
Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week II (April 7-11, 2008)
Their slogan this time is “Stop the Genocide.” Here is
the intro to their new student guide – the full thing
can be downloaded here.
We will of course be having a lot more to say soon
about the latest round of this dangerous campaign to
turn universities into sites of indoctrination:
From October 22 to October 26, 2007, students on more
than 100 campuses across the country hosted speakers,
put on panels, conducted sit-ins and showed
documentary films designed to alert campus communities
to the global threat from Islamo-Fascism, and to
protest the oppression of women in Islam. This spring,
during the week of April 7-11, we will hold another
week of consciousness-raising events. The purpose of
this week and the campaign leading up to it will be:
1) To highlight the genocidal agendas of the
Islamo-fascist crusade; and 2) To make the public
aware of the “soft jihad” – the domestic networks that
fund and provide political support for the agendas of
the jihad, including its armies of terror.
The core of the jihad is its intention to conquer and
force into submission all religions and cultures which
are not its own. It has absorbed the Nazi-virus of
Jew-hatred and seeks as its first goal the
obliteration of the Jewish state, but its agendas
include the obliteration of Christian communities and
all non-Muslim cultures as well.
The focus of our spring campaign will be the
Declaration Against Genocide, which we will ask campus
groups to sign. Specifically we are asking all campus
groups to repudiate the genocidal passage within
Islam’s sacred texts which reads: “The prophet, prayer
and peace be upon him, said: ‘The time [of judgment
and resurrection] will not come until Muslims will
fight the Jews and kill them; until the Jews hide
behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim!
There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill
him!’” (Sahih Muslim book 41, no. 6985)
Christians have distanced themselves from far less
ominous passages in their religious tradition because
of the terrible consequences that have flowed from
misguided beliefs.
The terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah are Islamic
parties who have dedicated themselves to the
destruction of the Jews. We are asking campus groups
to condemn Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist
organizations and to repudiate their Jew-hatred,
including the Hamas charter which says: “Israel will
exist and will continue to exist until Islam will
obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before
it.” Signers of the Declaration will also be asked to
condemn and repudiate the Iranian dictator Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad who has said “The accomplishment of a
world without America and Israel is both possible and
feasible.”
These are hateful doctrines that threaten the lives
not only of Jews, but of Christians and secularists as
well. While Israel is condemned as “the Little Satan,”
America is targeted as “the Great Satan” – the
incarnation of evil. The genocidal hatred of
Islamo-fascists is aimed at all Americans.
We are therefore launching a “Stop the Genocide”
campaign which will be the focus of our activities
this spring and the theme of Islamo-Fascism Awareness
Week on April 7-11. During this campaign, we will be
calling on campus groups to affirm the equal dignity
of all men and women and the right of all people to
live free from violence, intimidation, and coercion.
To carry out the campaign of education and awareness,
we will:
Gather signatures for the Declaration Against
Genocide. Ask campus groups to officially support it.
Host speakers on the topic of Islamo-Fascism and its
genocidal agendas
Show documentaries and feature films including Islam
versus Islam, Suicide Killers, Obsession and Path to
9/11
Hold memorials for the thousands of victims of Islamic
radicals before and after 9/11
Distribute informational literature including the two
pamphlets “Islamo-Fascism On Campus” and “Plan for
Genocide”
As the first Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week
demonstrated, in the present campus climate this
program is bound be controversial. A coalition of
groups with ties to the Islamo-fascist jihad are
likely to protest this educational effort. This spring
Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week will again test
universities’ claims to be politically open and
intellectually diverse. Once again our goal will be to
refute the curriculum of the left, which teaches that
America is the enemy in the war on terror and the
terrorists are “freedom fighters,” and that any
attempt to alert Americans to the dangers they face is
“Islamo-phobia.” Once again our task will be to remind
people that America is the only force in the world
that has the power and the will to confront the threat
of a global Islamo-Fascist state.
We expect that some universities will create
impediments to the planned protests and events, refuse
necessary permits or room reservations, and otherwise
demonstrate their hypocrisy by failing to allow
patriotic students a voice on campus. We hope to be
proven wrong, but past experience counsels otherwise.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center will enlist lawyers
and alumni to help student organizers fight these
battles.
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Posted in Events
Academic Freedom Teach-In at NYU
Freedoms at Risk Conference and Teach-In
http://www.nyu.edu/cas/studentcouncil/events.shtml
* Saturday, February 23, 2008
* Kimmel 4th Floor–Eisner and Lubin Auditorium
* 10:00 a.m.–10:00 p.m.
The CAS Student Council is proud to announce our biggest event of the semester: the First National Teach-In on Freedoms at Risk in America!
Freedoms at Risk is an all-day, educational and interactive event featuring some of our nation’s foremost academics and intellectuals, and students and faculty from both within and outside of the NYU campus. We’ve reserved an entire floor of the Kimmel
Center for Student Life from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. on Saturday, February 23
for our Political and Academic Freedoms Teach-Ins and our evening Plenum, all of which will be completely open to the public throughout the day!
A number of accomplished and controversial figures in
politics and
academics will be sharing their experiences and
thoughts, and
engaging in discussion and debate with audience
members, including
(in alphabetical order):
* Norman Finkelstein, noted academic who has held
faculty
positions at NYU, Rutgers University, and DePaul
University where he
was recently a victim of academic repression, and
author of five
books including the international best-seller The
Holocaust Industry:
Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering,
which has been
translated into twenty-four foreign languages
* Barbara Foley, Professor of English at Rutgers
University –
Newark Campus, Chair of the “Combatting Racism Task
Force of Now” –
New Jersey Chapter, and author of such works as
Spectres of 1919:
Class and Nationalism in the Making of the New Negro
* John Gerassi, a professor of the Queens
Political Science
Department who has written a number of books on
politics and
international affairs including an official biography
on Jean-Paul
Sartre
* Peter N. Kirstein, a professor of history at
Chicago’s Saint
Xavier University, author, and a nationally-recognized
advocate of
academic freedom and free-speech rights who has been
profiled in
conservative writer David Horowitz’s book, The
Professors: The 101
Most Dangerous Academics in America
* Mark Crispin Miller, currently a media studies
professor at
NYU who is active in his support of democratic media
reform; he is
also an accomplished author and has written such books
as Fooled
Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections and
Seeing Through Movies
* Bertell Ollman, a Professor of Politics at NYU
and two-time
victim of academic repression (University of Maryland
and University
of the West Indies, Jamaica), who has written Dance of
the Dialectic:
Steps in Marx’s Method and many other works
* Andrew Ross, Chair of the Department of Social
and Cultural
Analysis at NYU, President of the NYU Chapter of the
American
Association of University Professors, and writer who
has authored
such pieces as The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life
* Abby Scher, a sociologist and writer who has
conducted
extensive research on the politics of the McCarthy
period, and has
most recently written about the abuses of freedoms by
law enforcement
agents on a local level; she is currently writing
pieces on the
concept of Islamofascism and the hysteria in the
American public that
it induces
* Ellen Schrecker, Professor of History at
Yeshiva University,
the former editor of “Academe” (the magazine of the
American
Association of University Professors), the first ever
winner of the
Academic Freedom Fellowship from NYU’s Tamiment
Library, and author
of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities,
and other works
* Michael Steven Smith, a New York City attorney
and author who
recently edited The Emerging Police State by William
Kunstler, sits
on the Executive Board of the Center for
Constitutional Rights, and
co-hosts the WBAI radio program Law and Disorder with
Michael Ratner
and Heidi Boghosian
* Lynne Stewart, a widely recognized political
activist and
attorney who is noted for representing unpopular
clients, and has
experienced extensive recent political oppression; an
advocate of the
constitutional right to due process of law, she fights
to see that
right extended to anyone who is tried within the
American legal system
* Lorie Van Auken, winner of the Glamour Magazine
“Woman of the
Year” award in 2004 for her work with the other
“Jersey Girls” in
successfully lobbying for an independent investigation
into the
events of September 11, 2001
* Richard D. Wolff, Professor of Economics at the
University of
Massachusetts – Amherst Campus, co-founder of the
political journal
Re-thinking Marxism, and co-author of Knowledge and
Class: a Marxian
Critique of Political Economy among other works
We’re thrilled to have these speakers joining us for
our Teach-In,
and we eagerly await the date. There is no charge, and
refreshments
will be served! Join us for this momentous,
precedent-setting event
in academics and politics!
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Posted in Academic freedom, Events
The Chronicle News Blog: Michigan Professor Loses Longshot Campaign to Be President of Czech Republic
The presidential dreams of a University of Michigan professor ended today, when, after failing to produce a valid ballot in two previous rounds of voting, Czech lawmakers re-elected the incumbent, Vaclav Klaus, to another five-year term as president of the Central European country, Agence France-Presse reported.
The Czech-born academic, Jan Svejnar, is director of the International Policy Center and a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He had mounted what was initially viewed by many as a longshot bid for the Czech presidency.
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Posted in Faculty
Wausau Daily Herald: Obama: Community colleges key to evolving economy
Making higher education at community colleges more affordable and important in the eyes of Americans was Barack Obama’s message Saturday morning at Northcentral Technical College in Wausau.
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Posted in Politics
Rocky Mountain News: Faculty says ‘no’ to Benson
Boulder faculty representatives on Thursday overwhelmingly rejected a resolution supporting Bruce Benson to be the next University of Colorado president. The vote was 40-4, with three abstentions.
Physics professor Uriel Nauenberg, who chairs the Faculty Assembly, said the group “would prefer a presidential finalist with substantial executive managerial experience at a peer academic institution and a distinguished record of accomplishment in that arena.”
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Posted in Administration, Faculty
Inside Higher Ed: The Washington Post Company continues to diversify not in journalism but in for-profit education. Last year, the company reported that it took in more revenue from its Kaplan businesses than the newspaper business. In filings last week with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Post reported that it had purchased an 8.1 percent stake in Corinthian Colleges Inc.
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Posted in Corporate University
Inside Higher Ed: Career Education Inc. on Friday announced plans to shut nine colleges, seven of them part of the Katherine Gibbs chain, following a “teach out” period to help current students. A statement from Career Education said that the move was part of a previously announced strategy to focus on key areas, and that attempts to sell the colleges didn’t succeed. Supporters of New Hampshire’s McIntosh College, one of the institutions being shut down, are angry and frustrated, Seacoast Online reported.
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Posted in Corporate University
Inside Higher Ed: Loss for Immigrant Students; Win for Foreign Students
When Arizona voters passed Proposition 300 in 2006, they barred immigrant students without legal status from enrolling at in-state tuition rates or receiving state financial aid. As expected, the measure has led to declines in the number of such students enrolled at public colleges and universities. At Arizona State University, however, officials responded to Proposition 300 by announcing that they would use private scholarship funds to make up the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition rates.
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Posted in Students
Inside Higher Ed: Live From Another Stunned Campus…
In the hours after last week’s shooting at Northern Illinois University, Michael Van Der Harst wasn’t watching the television coverage of his campus. He was helping feed it.
As an editor at the Northern Star, the student newspaper, and a reporter for the campus station, Northern Television Center, Van Der Harst split his time speaking to sources and fielding phone calls until 2 a.m. “When I hung up the phone it would start ringing instantaneously,” the Northern Illinois junior said the morning after Steve Kazmierczak, a former NIU graduate student, killed five students plus himself in a lecture hall rampage. (For an update on developments at Northern Illinois, see the bottom of this article.)
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Posted in Media
The New York Times: Marymount Being Sold; Village to Gain Taxes
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY has agreed to sell the historic Marymount College campus in Tarrytown for $27 million to EF Education, a private language school with 10 campuses in the country and 35 throughout the world.
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Posted in Corporate University
Denver Post: Benson speaks his mind
The rough-edged oilman who may become CU’s next president loves challenges.
Bruce Benson was answering questions about his support for diversity on campus last week when he assured University of Colorado students that he absolutely supports the “handicaps.”
Students booed. But he used the term again.
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Posted in Administration
Dispatches From Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University
New post from Oronte Churm at McSweeney’s:
Dispatches From Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University
D I S P A T C H 16
On Ghosts.
By Oronte Churm
– – – –
London was cold and wet. Starbuck and I needed a place to rest, get warm, and have some juice and a coffee. But I was asked to leave one café because it was a betting shop in disguise—no children allowed—and a second because the owner said Starbuck’s collapsible stroller would take up too much room, though the place was empty. On the streets, every English granny in town glared at me for having a toddler out in public. Glancing around furtively, I did what any American under siege abroad would do—I went in a McDonald’s.
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Posted in Commentary