BY RACHEL IDA BUFF We are pleased to announce the publication of volume 11 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. The journal features scholarship on academic freedom and on its relation to shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining. This year’s volume considers the opposing visions of the governed campus and the “managed campus.” As the…
BY ELYSE CRYSTALL In my circle of family and friends in Brooklyn, the word chutzpah could indicate admiration for someone who asserted herself, spoke truth to power in spite of what others thought: “She had the chutzpah to challenge the senator’s policy on Medicaid expansion.” More often, however, chutzpah expressed disgust at a person who…
BY GREGORY SCHOLTZ The American Association of University Professors has authorized an investigation of the crisis in academic governance that has occurred in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on seven institutions: Canisius College (NY), Illinois Wesleyan University, Keuka College (NY), Marian University(WI), Medaille College (NY), National University (CA), and Wittenberg University…
BY HANK REICHMAN Stephen F. Cohen, one of the world’s leading scholars of Soviet and post-Soviet history and politics and emeritus professor at Princeton and New York Universities, died of lung cancer on Friday at the age of 81. The author of ten books and numerous scholarly articles, Cohen was also a prominent public intellectual…
BY JENNIFER RUTH It sounds like a bad joke. The Department of Education (DOE) has apparently launched an investigation into Princeton University. Why? Because President Eisgruber said that racism is embedded in the university structures and its history. “Based on its admitted racism, the U.S. Department of Education is concerned Princeton’s nondiscrimination and equal opportunity…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this month the Trump administration instructed federal agencies to end racial sensitivity trainings that address topics like white privilege or employ critical race theory, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda.” In response, AAUP President Irene Mulvey issued a statement that deemed the move “a naked attempt to politicize our national reckoning with…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS), a Canadian conservative advocacy group for academic freedom, issued a letter denouncing last week’s Scholar Strike. I believe the SAFS argument is wrong on two points, first when it claims that when universities support political activity, they are violating the academic freedom of students…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following open letter was published today in The Guardian. Dear Joe Biden, We write to you as the first generation made worse-off because of higher education. Student debt is a national crisis that destroys lives, drags down the economy and fuels the racial wealth gap. No one should be forced…
BY HUEY-LI LI In the middle of World War II, the AAUP published its oft-quoted 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure in order to “promote public understanding and support of academic freedom and tenure and agreement upon procedures to ensure them in colleges and universities.” In response to the outbreak of the…
BY STEVEN LUBET Best known as an essayist and short-story writer, and former editor of The American Scholar, Joseph Epstein retired in 2002 after 30 years in the English Department at Northwestern University. As an emeritus lecturer, however, he still receives university announcements, which recently led him to complain about a decline in teaching standards.…