POSTED BY THE AAUP In an amicus brief filed on Friday, the AAUP emphasized the importance of faculty being able to use controversial language and ideas to challenge students in the classroom, and argued that Professor Teresa Buchanan’s academic freedom was violated when Louisiana State University dismissed her for making statements in the classroom that…
BY HENRY REICHMAN Teresa Buchanan, the Louisiana State University (LSU) education professor terminated over strong objections from a faculty review committee and the Faculty Senate, last week filed a federal First Amendment lawsuit against the president of LSU and other top administrators for violating her free speech and due process rights by firing her last…
By an overwhelming 39-5 vote the Louisiana State University (LSU) Faculty Senate today (October 6) voted to censure three top administrators for their roles in the dismissal of tenured professor Teresa Buchanan for allegedly creating a hostile environment in classes with sexually explicit jokes. LSU Baton Rouge has been on the AAUP’s list of censured…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Last week, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) released a new database of more than four hundred “Scholars Under FIRE” since 2015 and announced it in breathtaking terms starting with the headline: “REPORT: 3 in 4 campaigns targeting faculty expression result in punishment.” In reality, this three-in-four number included any…
BY HANK REICHMAN The headline on Inside Higher Ed was provocative, if not downright inflammatory: “AAUP vs. FIRE.” But rather than the knockdown drag-out contest between two national organizations celebrated for their defense of intellectual freedom implied by the headline, the article that followed offered something much more modest. The AAUP chapter at the University…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Today, I’ll be speaking on a PEN America panel about “Academic Freedom and Classroom Conduct” along with Jonathan Friedman, Neijma Celestine-Donnor, and Amna Khalid. So I wanted to offer a few thoughts about what academic freedom means in the classroom. Along with freedom of research and extramural utterances, freedom of teaching…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today the Washington Post published an important op-ed piece, “If colleges keep killing academic freedom, civilization will die, too,” by José A. Cabranes, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Cabranes, a Bill Clinton appointee and highly respected jurist, previously served as General Counsel for Yale University…
BY HANK REICHMAN This is the fourth in a series of posts on issues in the University of California system, the nation’s premier public research institution. Previous posts in the series may be found here, here, and here. On Friday, the University of California at Berkeley announced that Provost Claude Steele is stepping down from…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of my keynote address at the annual plenary of the University Senate at the University of Pittsburgh on March 30, 2016. Some passages in the text are taken from my essay, “Does Academic Freedom Have a Future?,” published in the November-December 2015 issue of Academe. I am…
BY RISA LIEBERWITZ Yesterday, AAUP posted for public comment a draft report, “The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX.” This extensive report, an evaluation of the history and current uses of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, is a joint effort authored by a subcommittee (which I chaired) comprised of members of…