BY TIMOTHY KAUFMAN-OSBORN Much has been said about the radical right’s assault on the autonomy of US public higher education and that campaign’s subversion of academic freedom. Today, for example, we all know about Florida’s Stop WOKE Act as well as it successor, SB 266, which expressly prohibits faculty from teaching that “systemic racism, sexism,…
BY THE MIDDLE EAST STUDIES ASSOCIATION OF NORTH AMERICA The following statement by the president of the Middle East Studies Association and the chair of that association’s Committee on Academic Freedom was published online on December 18. Open Letter to US and Canadian College and University Presidents We write on behalf of the Middle East…
BY THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE NEW YORK UNIVERSITY AAUP CHAPTER The following statement was issued on December 18, 2023. Since October 7th, our university community has experienced extraordinary challenges to academic freedom. These challenges emerge in a global climate of restrictions on Palestine- related speech, along with a national climate of attacks against the…
BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE By definition, a military base, regardless of location, is a potential military target in a time of war. Adults, be they enlisted personnel or civilians, who work in such a place, a place dedicated to warfare, implicitly accept the risk of attack. The risk might be low and rarely discussed, but on…
BY ALAN SINGER An earlier version of this blog post appeared on the Daily Kos. We are reposting it here with permission of the author. Many of us have seen the congressional sound bites. MAGA superstar Elise Stefanik made mincemeat out of Ivy League college presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard, Liz Magill of the University of…
BY THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY AAUP CHAPTER The following statement was issued on December 14, 2023. Since October 7, Columbia University has experienced extraordinary, even unprecedented, challenges to academic freedom and violations of faculty governance. Untenured faculty have been harassed for organizing events squarely within their fields of expertise; a Barnard department…
BY LOUIS EPSTEIN Faculty have plenty of reasons to feel anxious, among them the widely publicized threats to our unique, enviable forms of shared governance. I won’t rehearse those threats here. If we spend more time bemoaning our present state than articulating our strengths, we’ll slip into a malaise from which recovery is unlikely. Instead,…
BY THE AAUP-PENN EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE This morning, Marc Rowan, CEO of private equity firm Apollo Global Management in New York, who initiated the successful effort to remove University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill, distributed an email to the university’s trustees posing a series of eighteen questions, several of which raise serious concerns about the fate…
BY DON NONINI, SHELDON POLLOCK, AND DAN SEGAL Over the past decade, faculty have most often encountered the problem of financial investments and the climate crisis when their students mobilized to divest their school’s endowments from fossil fuels. That mobilization, across some 1600 educational, religious, and other institutions world-wide, has been stunningly successful: to date,…
BY THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF AAUP-PENN The following statement was issued by the executive committee of the University of Pennsylvania AAUP chapter on December 9 in response to the resignation of Penn President Elizabeth Magill following her much-criticized testimony before a Congressional committee. In recent months, trustees, donors, lobbying organizations, and members of Congress have…