A letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education on the em World Socialist Web Site /em , Nikole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project wsws.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wsws.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A president is out, less than two years after his controversial appointment.
Sean Rayford, Getty Images
Lt. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr. resigned this week as president of the University of South Carolina.
It was a short-lived but controversy-ridden experience for Caslen, who was appointed in July 2019. The last straw came a week ago during his commencement address, during which he referred to the South Carolina graduates as the newest alumni from the University of California. FITSNews, a website that covers South Carolina politics, later reported that a chunk of the address had been plagiarized from a 2014 speech given by Adm. William H. McRaven at the University of Texas at Austin.
The Hopkins political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg wrote
The Fall of the Faculty in 2011. I hope to wake up the faculty, he told
Inside Higher Ed at the time. We’re like the residents of a Japanese city living next to the ocean and thinking the tsunami won’t affect us.
Ten years later, is the tsunami here? The water is at least rising. Our Tom Bartlett and Jack Stripling report on the events at Linfield University, where Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a tenured English professor, appears to have been summarily fired for criticizing the institution s president. This is just the latest in a string of similar incidents, including Garrett Felber s dismissal from the University of Mississippi for what many suspect are political reasons, and L.D. Burnett s from Collin College, where she seems to have been fired for tweets criticizing Republican politicians and her institution s administration. Felber was a tenure-track professor; Burnett was a contract employee.