Academic Freedom

Capitalist Economic Violence Against Road Scholars: Now You’re Hired, Now You’re Not

Economic violence against adjuncts
Just recently I went through a destabilizing, confusing, painful, shocking and infuriating experience of being stripped of my rehire rights as an adjunct college instructor. For those who do not know the term “road scholar” or “freeway flyer” is another way of saying that I cobble together a livelihood traveling from college to college. Adjuncts are like intellectual day laborers: the last hired and the first fired, with few, if any, protections or recognition.

Turkey: Land Without Free Speech or Basic Human Rights

A while ago, the president of Turkey claimed that there is freedom of speech in his country and he said, “In my country, there is no problem with freedom, everyone talks the way they like, everyone lives out their faith, everyone dresses the way they want, everyone eats and drinks whatever they desire. We haven’t brought any prohibitions. My country is no more a country with prohibitions.

Clipping Academic Freedom: Australian University Management

Universities have become bastions of managerial madness.  The trends began some time ago, when money became the ultimate pursuit, and Mr Dollar became chancellor and chief.  The obsession with obtaining grants, the panjandrums awarding grants, the siphoning off funds, underwriting projects, have all made the academy a sad state.  Since universities now obsess about having a “marketing unit”, the idea of making education a matter of commercial viability rather than educational worth has become all important.

At the Intersection of Zionism and Social Justice

In her oily, cringe-inducing and totally predictable speech to AIPAC on March 21, Hillary Clinton argued that, since (according to her) “anti-Semitism is on the rise across the world… we must repudiate all efforts to malign, isolate and undermine Israel and the Jewish people.” In other words, we must do what we can to shut down any legitimate criticism of Israeli policy. A reliable means of doing so is to conflate said criticism with anti-Semitism and thus vilify the critic in question.

Islamophobia, Hatred, and the Arabic Language

Recently, a teacher at a school in Augusta County, Virginia handed out a homework assignment. The homework, part of the Geography curriculum, dealt with world religions. Among other exercises, it included a question asking students to copy Arabic calligraphy (in order to help them understand the complexity of calligraphy in the Arabic language).
Here is the question:

America Is Being Destroyed by Problems That Are Unaddressed

One hundred years ago European civilization, as it had been known, was ending its life in the Great War, later renamed World War I. Millions of soldiers ordered by mindless generals into the hostile arms of barbed wire and machine gun fire had left the armies stalemated in trenches. A reasonable peace could have been reached, but US President Woodrow Wilson kept the carnage going by sending fresh American soldiers to try to turn the tide against Germany in favor of the English and French.