BY HANK REICHMAN I’m an historian by discipline, but I didn’t attend this year’s meetings of the American Historical Association (AHA) last week in Denver. I wish I had, if only to have heard the discussion of “Historical Expertise and Political Authority,” described by Colleen Flaherty in her report on the meeting for Inside Higher…
Stanley Fish, Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution (University of Chicago, 2014) Reviewed by Steve Macek, North Central College Literary critic, law professor, one time New York Times columnist, former dean and noted public intellectual, Stanley Fish has made a name for himself as a wry commentator on college life and campus politics.…
‘Academic freedom is in the eye of the beholder.’ That, I think, will be the most common takeaway by readers of Stanley Fish’s new book Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). After all, he breaks the concept into five “schools”: The “It’s just a job” school (his own…
I’m getting rather tired of finding myself agreeing with Stanley Fish–but it has happened again. Though I have admired Fish’s intellect and verbal ability for some thirty years now, only recently have I found myself nodding in agreement with things he writes. What bothers me is that I suspect either 1) I wasn’t reading him…
BY MARTHA MCCAUGHEY AND SCOTT WELSH In the fall 2021 issue of Academe we describe the problem of a “shadow curriculum” in the form of student-affairs programming that (re)shapes students’ education on campus, encroaching on the faculty’s role in governance of courses and curriculum. From our perspective as faculty members guided by AAUP principles, such…
BY JOHN K. WILSON I interviewed Henry Reichman, chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, about his new book, The Future of Academic Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press). Reichman will discuss his book on a panel at the AAUP’s Annual Conference on June 13, 2019 in Arlington, Virginia and other future…
BY HANK REICHMAN “We can respect the right of free speech without having to respect the ideas being uttered.” — Joan W. Scott, “On Free Speech and Academic Freedom” (forthcoming) This is the final installment in a four-part series. Part I may be found here; part II is here; part III is here. Academic Freedom…
BY HANK REICHMAN “A university without student protests against visiting speakers would be like a forest without birds.” — Timothy Garton Ash, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, p. 155 This is the first of three four posts in a series. The issue of the right of controversial and sometimes deeply offensive invited…
BY DON ERON This guest post comes from remarks by Don Eron at the April 29 Academic Freedom Symposium at the University of Colorado Boulder. Don Eron is a retired University of Colorado Boulder writing instructor and a member of the national AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The AAUP I’d like to talk about…
BY DON ERON Guest blogger Don Eron is a retired University of Colorado Boulder writing instructor and a member of the national AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. As higher education budgets shrink, partisanship increases, and social media magnify and distort messages, the state of academic freedom in Colorado and across the country will be…