mortiz055

The month since the inauguration has made it crystal clear that universities and colleges are going to face a wide range of challenges and attacks in the next few years.  President Trumps's appointment of Betsy Devos (known for her contempt both for public institutions and for the  faculty within them ) as Secretary of Education and Jerry Fallwell Jr. ( a major recipient of federal funds through student loans ) to chair a task-force on higher education both signal hostility to public higher education.  More generally, President Trump has made clear his opposition to some of the most important core principles of colleges and universities: open intellectual inquiry, the internationalism of knowledge and the free movement of ideas and researchers, and the idea that knowledge is best used when it is public and not subordinated to the interest of the state or political parties.  The Trump Administration and its allies have attacked the legitimacy of scientific resea...

The turmoil surrounding Milo Yiannopoulos's visit to Berkeley has garnered national attention.  Despite the reality that UC Berkeley as an institution honored the invitation of the College Republicans and that the protests by campus members were peaceful and in accord with everyone's First Amendment rights (I say nothing here about the individuals who invaded the protest intent on violence) right-wing figures from President Trump on down have used the incident to inveigh against the University and to threaten its funding and demean its students and faculty. The eagerness with which the Right has attacked UC Berkeley (both the institution and the students, faculty and administrators) should not surprise us: it is clear that there is now a concerted effort from Iowa to Tennessee to W isconsin to North Carolina and beyond to undermine the academic autonomy of public universities and to decimate employee rights.  In this situation it is more important than ever that universit...

As you may recall, a bill to eliminate tenure was recently introduced into the Iowa State Senate . After a good deal of pushback  it appears to have stalled .  But that doesn't mean that the state's Republicans are done trying to attack the rights of Iowa's public workers.  In their latest salvo, they are proposing to severely restrict the range of public employee collective bargaining (with the exception of police and firefighters) and also to make it more difficult to establish and maintain union representation . Although this is a widespread attack on all public employees , the proposed legislation will strike hard at the state's graduate student employees. At the core of the proposed legislation are two important issues.  The first is to make it illegal to negotiate things like benefits or supplemental income or retirement.  In effect, the aim is to make it possible only to negotiate on wages and leave workers to the whims of their employers (or the Governor...