Oh no, what horrible news. Bea was an absolute lifelong fighter for a better world, a link to several previous eras of organizing going back to the Great Depression, a constant presence that felt infinite. Her loss is monumental.
We were asked this year to believe this, that the imposition of curricular and expressive controls over teaching at Lab had no bearing on academic freedom on central campus:
This is *exactly* what our chapter warned about in our open letter on the Lab School Standards:
chicagomaroon.com/52978/viewpo...
Excellent op-ed from our own Mark Levin on UChicago's deal with Anthropic:
Soren Spicknall
Faculty have a responsibility to protect classrooms as a training ground for thinking, and proliferating LLMs endanger this core mission of the University.
Now we find out that the vice provost whose job is the interpretation/enforcement of the Kalven Report (the principles ostensibly being implemented at Lab), has all the while been writing a document on how universities need to assert more central control over academic departments
UChicago AAUP
UChicago AAUP
UChicago AAUP
UChicago AAUP
UChicago AAUP
UChicago AAUP
People who might not be down with the ultimate end goal of policing knowledge (Wilentz, Appiah) have nevertheless signed on to the effort because they have particular axes to grind within their disciplines against intellectual work they personally don’t like.
The Vanderbilt report and Trump’s attack on the NIH and NSF are part of the same right-wing effort to attack the authority of all peer-reviewed knowledge so that they can police what researchers write, say, publish, and think to ensure it complies with corporate-friendly aims.
