POSTED BY THE AAUP We are pleased to announce the publication of volume 13 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. Our fall 2021 call for papers, “Memory Laws or Gag Laws? Disinformation Meets Academic Freedom,” invited scholarly responses to the wave of legislation seeking to ban or restrict teaching about race and racism. As…
BY HANK REICHMAN Ohio State University professor emeritus Harvey Graff, who occasionally posts to this blog, has a smart and entertaining piece today in the Washington Monthly on “The Banality of University Slogans.” You know, the kind of mindless “branding” pablum like, “Here, everything is possible!” It brought to mind the time when my university,…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF In my new Journal of Academic Freedom article, “The Nondebate about Critical Race Theory and Our American Moment,” I discuss battles over the past in the context of the US reckoning with truth, reconciliation, collective knowledge, and the pursuit of an inclusive, equitable democracy. These battles at the intersection of past,…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF Growing up was always hard to do. It’s getting harder, and universities now are doing little to help the new “lost generation.” Experts on children, youth, and college students never tire of superficial generalizations about the ease or difficulty of growing up over time. They seldom define terms, specify ages, present…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF Professors, lecturers, graduate teaching assistants, and especially presidents and provosts often repeat the word “literacy.” But they almost never pause to define or constructively criticize it. Why does it matter? That is a question I ask each of us to ponder. The Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung put it aptly: “What would…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF We live in a new age of division. Universities are so often centers of differences, contradictions, and clashes between knowledge and ignorance. One revealing site is the false opposition of the faculty and the—to faculty and academic administration—second-class “professionals” in departments of student affairs and student life. Critically, this dichotomy parallels…
Note: At the end of April, the editors of the Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, penned an editorial supporting BDS and Palestinian liberation. In response,150 members of the Harvard Faculty wrote a statement criticizing the editorial. Another group of faculty penned their own response, which was published in the Harvard Crimson. This letter is…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF Today’s campaigns to ban books in schools—nationally organized and well-funded by right-wing donors and interest groups—are unprecedented, unconstitutional, and inhumane. Their instigators, unlike predecessors who led past campaigns, are ignorant of the texts they seek to erase, and sometimes burn. They have no understanding of “the people” or “public interest”; children’s…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF In my recent Washington Monthly essay, “The Banality of University Slogans,” I observed that “whether it’s ad campaigns for football season, gauzy reports from the provost, or bombast from the school’s president, higher education abounds with empty rhetoric.” In “Per Aspera ad Astra” Academe Blog contributing editor Hank Reichman shared and…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF New York Times right-wing opinion writer Ross Douthat led the November 11, 2021, print edition of the editorial pages with “Why We Need New Colleges.” Readers familiar with his fantasy-laden writing will not be surprised. I always shake my head when reading Douthat’s never-documented imaginings, but sometimes, like that day, I…