Month: November 2015

From the Far Right, a List of “Weird” Stuff Said and Done by Lefties on Campus

ACADEME BLOG

Writing for the Far-Right website RedState, John Hawkins provides the following list of “15 Excerpts That Show How Radical, Weird And Out of Touch College Campuses Have Become”:

1) “College Students Say Remembering 9/11 Is Offensive to Muslims”: The everything-is-offensive brand of campus activism has struck a new low: Students at the University of Minnesota killed a proposed moment of silence for 9/11 victims due to concerns—insulting, childish concerns—that Muslim students would be offended.

2) “Portland State University Offers Course Teaching How to ‘Make Whiteness Strange”: According to Portland State University Professor Rachel Sanders’ “White Privilege” course, “whiteness” must be dismantled if racial justice will ever be achieved. The course description states that “whiteness is the lynchpin of structures of racial meaning and racial inequality in the United States” and claims that “to preserve whiteness is to preserve racial injustice.” Students taking the course will “endeavor to…

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Addendum to the Call for Papers for the AAUP’s 2016 Annual Meeting

ACADEME BLOG

The Collective Bargaining Congress has created a Subcommittee on Racial Justice, which has recommended the following list of suggested topics for presentations at the AAUP’s annual meeting in June. The list is consistent with the broader Call for Proposals but offers more specific suggestions.

All proposals need to be submitted by December 7 and should be submitted digitally through the AAUP website; the link is provided in the information about the conference provided in this post below the list of topics.

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1. The Role of the AAUP in Promoting Racial and Social Justice Strategies:

(a) Linkages with Other Academic Associations; Linkages with Student Groups; Linkages with Other Labor, Formally Political, and Progressive Activist Groups; The Models Available in Other Professional Associations That Promote Social and Racial Justice;

(b) Strategies for Addressing Racial and Social Justice Issues on the Conference and Chapter Levels;

(c) Strategies for Attracting More Faculty of Color…

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Ohio Legislation Permitting “Campus-Carry” Passes House. Now What?

ACADEME BLOG

Thank you to our members who took the time to send a message to their State Representative opposing House Bill 48. We had nearly 1,000 e-mails sent through our Action Network page by the end of House session on the day of the vote.

Despite our efforts, and the efforts of many other groups opposed to this “guns everywhere” bill, the legislation was passed by the House by a vote of 63 to 25. Perhaps more disappointing than the vote itself was the process. This bill was rushed to a floor vote, and Speaker Rosenberger did not allow any legislator opposed to the bill speak against, as he quickly moved to taking the vote after the sponsor summarized the legislation.

Regardless, it is so important that those Representatives heard our opposition, and we still have time to take action to convince the Senate not to go down this road.

At…

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Opportunities for Advocacy of the Humanities and of Funding for the Humanities

ACADEME BLOG

This post does not represent an AAUP endorsement of the events being sponsored by the National Humanities Alliance. I myself am not even a member of this organization. But in a large number of posts to this blog, a number of contributors have made the case for the value of the Humanities, and this organization is obviously a major advocate for the Humanities and for Humanities funding.

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Register for NHA Annual Meeting and Humanities Advocacy Day

Make the case for the humanities on Capitol Hill!

Register today for the 2016 National Humanities Alliance Annual Meeting and Humanities Advocacy Day!

March 14-15, 2016

George Washington University’s Marvin Center and Capitol Hill
Washington, D.C.

Featured Speakers:
Bro Adams, Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities
Max Kenner, Founder and Executive Director, Bard Prison Initiative

Click here to register today.

Call for Proposals for November 2016 National Humanities Conference

We are pleased…

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Notoriety as a Rationale for Demonization

ACADEME BLOG

This past week, Danny Ledonne’s documentary Playing Columbine was scheduled to be shown and discussed in a public forum at Adams State University, from which he has very publicly been banned under threat of arrest.

If you have been following the posts to this blog on the university’s efforts to characterize him as a dangerously disgruntled former employee, you may remember that he made a controversial video game about the Columbine massacre in order to provoke discussion about the linkages between playing violent video games and committing mass murder. Then, after the game provoked considerable controversy, he decided to make the documentary to explore the broad spectrum of very impassioned responses to the game. The documentary was so well received that, paradoxically but also predictably, it caused some to reappraise their responses to the video game.

Danny Ledonne completed both of these projects well before he returned to Colorado and…

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A Terrible Addendum to Thursday’s Post on Why Guns on Campus Are a Bad Idea

ACADEME BLOG

The Washington Post has just reported the following:

“Jacob Marberger, the student at Washington College in Maryland whose disappearance prompted a suspension of classes, has been found dead in Pennsylvania, the state police there said.

“The Hamburg, Pa., division of the state police said he was found Saturday afternoon at Hawk Mountain sanctuary. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the police said.

“The college, in Chestertown, had shut down operations after information indicated that Marberger was upset and armed.

“Relatives said he had been despondent over events at his college.

“The state police said he was found by sanctuary personnel in a picnic area along with the vehicle he was believed to be operating, the police said. It was not clear how long he had been dead. . . .”

The one certainty in this tragically escalating series of events is that the sense of loss among Jacob Marberger’s…

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AAUP Leadership in Midst of CUNY Activism

ACADEME BLOG

On October 20, The Excelsior, the student news site at Brooklyn College published an article titled “Brooklyn College PSC Continues to Press CUNT and the State.”

At the top of the article is this photo, of James Davis, who served several terms on the Executive Committee of AAUP’s national Collective Bargaining Congress, and Rudy Fichtenbaum, president of AAUP:

James Davis and Rudy

The complete article is available at: http://bcexcelsior.com/brooklyn-college-psc-continues-to-press-cuny-and-the-state/. No author is identified.

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“It’s the End of the University as We Know It”

ACADEME BLOG

The following piece was published originally on the website of the AAUP chapter at the University of Akron. Although it addresses issues at their institution, none of those issues are specific to their institution alone.
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{The title of this post] was, quite literally, the take-home message from President Scarborough’s State of the University address. In it, he presented slides that made the case for challenges facing mid-range public universities like The University of Akron at a time of shrinking resources. He sent the audience home with a bound copy of glossy articles to support his claims. But is the future as dire as these articles would suggest, and, if so, are the proposed initiatives the best way to react? Or will they make a perilous situation even worse?

And will these initiatives indeed make UA a great, nationally known university, or will they provide only a misleading “look” of…

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Campus-Carry Legislation Being Expedited in the Ohio House

ACADEME BLOG

The consideration of a campus-carry bill is being accelerated through the Ohio House.

Ohio House Bill 48 is scheduled for a vote on the House floor tomorrow, November 17.

If you are an Ohio resident, please contact your State Representative ASAP using our form [https://actionnetwork.org/letters/ask-your-state-rep-to-vote-no-on-hb-48?source=email&] to tell them that you oppose this bill.

HB 48 reduces the offense for unauthorized carrying of a concealed handgun on the premises of an institution of higher education to a minor misdemeanor if the offender produces a valid conceal-carry license within ten days of arrest.

The bill would allow Ohio colleges and universities to develop a policy for allowing conceal-carry of handguns on campus and would grant institutions immunity from liability caused by a conceal/carry licensee bringing a gun on to campus.

The Ohio Conference AAUP consistently has opposed any measures that would open the door for conceal-carry on campuses. In fact…

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