Academics are increasingly becoming targets of online harassment, but too many universities and colleges are unprepared to support and protect their faculty. What steps should they take?
Academics are increasingly becoming targets of online harassment, but too many universities and colleges are unprepared to support and protect their faculty. What steps should they take?
Today, the Hon. Lynn Smith issued her report on the UBC academic freedom controversy that I discussed here. Jennifer Berdahl issued her response at her blog. The key pieces of the report are: "UBC...
Why Worry About Online Media and Academic Freedom? Um, because academic administrations have lousy instincts? I have gotten involved in this whole online media intersecting with academic freedom...
Over the weekend news came from Ecuador that Dr Manuela Picq of Universidad San Francisco de Quito, had been beaten and arrested while participating in a legal protest over indigenous rights as a...
Dear Kansas Board of Regents, Greetings. I don’t know if you received my first open-letter to you in December. My parents have pretty slow Internet in central Kansas so maybe the page is still loading. Hopefully, you’ll read the letter once you get it. In December, I wrote about your proposed social media policy and how it really would scare me if I was still faculty at Kansas State University or any of your other Kansas institutions. Of course, I know not to post things that would go against existing federal laws (FERPA) and know not to incite violence in my social media posts. ...
I might have to re-think this whole life choice. Tenure is supposed to mean more than just job security--that it is about academic freedom. To teach and research in ways that may not always be popular and certainly in ways that are not politically desirable. Yet in the past couple of weeks, we have seen that tenure may not be all that it is cracked up to be. The more famous case right now is at U of Colorado at Boulder where a prof seems to have been retired a wee bit early because of how she was teaching prostitution. To be clear, the topic is quite germane (this was not a math class)...
Chen Guangcheng, the Chinese dissident who found refuge last year in the United States with a fellowship at NYU is now claiming that he is being pushed out of NYU because his human rights advocacy and criticisms of the Chinese government is upsetting NYU's relationship with China. From the NYTimes: In a statement released Sunday, Mr. Chen said university officials were worried that his outspoken criticism of the Chinese government might threaten academic cooperation. N.Y.U. recently opened a campus in Shanghai, and a number of professors are involved in programs and research projects here...
Apparently, the Arab Spring will not come to the UAE this weekend. Planners of an LSE conference on the implications of the Arab Spring set for this weekend in UAE have cancelled the event after efforts by senior UAE officials to control the content. From the BBC: A senior LSE academic told the BBC he had been detained at the airport in Dubai on Friday. Dr Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, who is the co-director of the Kuwait programme at LSE, said immigration authorities had separated him from his colleagues and confiscated his passport before denying him entry and sending him back to London. In...