December 2008
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Witt from Columbia to Yale
John Witt (American legal history) at Columbia Law School has accepted a senior offer from Yale Law School, where he will start in July 2009. (Columbia had several years ago warded off an attempt by Harvard to lure him away.) Last year, Columbia also lost Thomas Merrill (administrative and environmental law, property) to Yale. (On the…
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Duquesne Dean Ousted
And "ousted" seems to be the right word. The University President and Central Administration do not come out of this looking too good. UPDATE: The Dean's public letter. Pretty shocking. If its contents are accurate, it would be shocking if the University President isn't gone within the year.
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Financial Crisis Hits the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at Harvard
Details here; an excerpt from the Deans’ letter to department chairs: First, we plan to keep all faculty and non-union staff salaries flat next year. Union staff have a contract with the University, which has been negotiated with the central administration. Second, we are postponing almost all current tenure-track and tenured searches. There will be…
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Update on the Tel Aviv Clinic Situation
A story from Haaretz. More news likely tomorrow or even later today (I believe the law faculty has already met on this issue, and the Dean and faculty are expected to authorize the clinic to go forward with the planned representation of the workers at the Weizmann Institute of Science). Various letters have been sent…
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Four Million Dollar (Canadian) Gift to Philosophy at Western Ontario!
Philosophy departments don’t get gifts like this everyday! More details here.
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Illinois Governor Arrested in Corruption Scandal
I suppose everyone knows about this. As I said to some colleagues and students who were gathered around the TV in the lounge watching news reports this morning, "Why can't Illinois have a normal governor who merely patronizes prostitutes?"
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Regional Meetings for Chairs of Philosophy Departments?
Sanford Goldberg, Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University, writes: I just came back from a meeting with one of the Chairs of a dept here at Northwestern who mentioned to me that in his field (physics) the chairs of midwestern physics departments get together once a year, by themselves, to talk about…
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PGR Surveys Have Begun
E-mailed invitations to participate in the new PGR surveys began going out this morning. More will go out through tomorrow, at least, as we fix e-mail errors and the like. Please contact me if you encounter any problems with the survey or have questions.
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Attack on Academic Freedom at Tel Aviv University
The distinguihsed legal scholar Alon Harel, who holds a Chair at the Hebrew University of Jersualem and has also taught at many U.S. law schools (including Columbia and Texas), writes: The Faculty of law at the University of Tel Aviv has suffered greatly in recent weeks. Regrettably, the Provost of the University of Tel Aviv…
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In Memoriam: Andrzej Zabludowski (1938-2008)
Justyna Grudzinska (Warsaw University) writes: Andrzej Zabludowski died on November 11th. At the time of his death he was affiliated with Warsaw University. He left Poland in 1968, driven out by the communist regime’s repressiveness and anti-Semitism, emigrated to the U.S. and was affiliated with different American universities. He came back to Poland in 1997. …
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PGR Update
It looks like we are on track for the invitation e-mails for the new surveys to go out on Monday, December 8. The survey will run through Friday, January 2. We have a total of 469 nominated evaluators, though if past experience is any indication, not all the e-mail invites will go through successfully, but…
Georgy Maksimovich pointed me to this article in Russian: https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/05/25/antisovetskie-filosofskie-kontratseptsii