BY JOHN K. WILSON I have an essay posted today at the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) blog about a particularly disturbing case at Kent State University where state legislators are explicitly threatening millions of dollars in state funding unless the university bans a textbook that offended the Republican politicians. Here are…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On October 28, the AAUP sent a letter, signed by President Irene Mulvey and me, to New York University president Andrew Hamilton urging him to address the academic freedom concerns raised by Zoom’s censorship of an event sponsored by the NYU AAUP and others. On November 6, we received the following…
BY IRENE MULVEY The following letter from AAUP president Irene Mulvey was emailed to AAUP members on November 10: The voters have spoken. Unprecedented voter turnout has affirmed the strength of our democracy. Like others who value education and truth, science and facts, Black lives and human rights, we breathed a collective sigh of relief…
BY DAVID A. VAREL These days, as any job seeker will tell you, universities are prioritizing diversity on their faculties. The way they are conceptualizing it has expanded dramatically over time, now including not only race and gender but also sexual orientation, disability, military service, and many other categories. Yet one omission is especially striking:…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In 2016, right after the Presidential election, I wrote on this blog: Nobody has a crystal ball but given the president-elect’s words and acts during the campaign—not to mention his seedy experiment in higher education—we would be fools not to expect an attack on the liberal institutions of shared governance and academic…
BY ALANA LENTIN AND CO-SIGNATORIES This open letter was originally published on openDemocracy on November 5 and is republished here with permission from the author. A critical response to the Manifesto signed by over 100 French academics and published in the newspaper Le Monde on 2 November 2020, after the assassination of the school teacher, Samuel…
BY IRENE MULVEY AAUP president Irene Mulvey sent the following email to members on November 4, 2020: Election Day has passed, and, as expected, we are still awaiting the outcome while states continue to count ballots. The outcome of this election could have a profound impact on our nation, our local communities, and our campuses.…
BY HANK REICHMAN This past weekend the San Francisco Chronicle carried an article reporting that a white emeritus professor of economics at California State University, East Bay (CSUEB) — where I taught for twenty-five years before fully retiring in 2015 — “is teaching racist theories on intelligence. Students and faculty want him out.” A petition…
BY STEVEN LUBET Steven Lubet is Williams Memorial Professor and Director of the Bartlit Center for Trial Advocacy at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. A version of this post appeared at The Faculty Lounge on October 28. It was deeply objectionable when Zoom and other networking platforms blocked Leila Khaled’s webinars at San Francisco…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Readers of this blog may recall that shortly after the vice-presidential debate history professor Lora Burnett was hounded by trolls for Twitter comments that referred to Vice-President Pence as a “demon” and that her college administration buckled under the pressure to denounce her in a notorious October 12 statement. I blogged…