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…
BY BENJAMIN N. LAWRANCE This past election cycle many, if not most, eyes were on Ohio. Would it be the seventh state in a row to recognize a woman’s bodily integrity as a constitutional right? In the excitement (or disappointment) last Tuesday, however, the ongoing national struggle over history education received short shrift. Buried in…
BY LOGAN JOHNSON In 2020, state bans on teaching “divisive concepts” in elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education began sweeping our nation. These prohibitions, referred to as educational gag orders, have put educators at risk of penalties if they incorporate materials and discussions in their classrooms regarding race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities, and minority narratives of United…
BY KEVIN HOWLEY In recent weeks, college students across the country have raised their voices in support of the Palestinian people, whose collective punishment at the hands of the Israeli government and their enablers in the United States and across Western Europe is both shameful and horrific. For conservative culture warriors, pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college…
BY CORY JAMES YOUNG I was having a conversation with a graduate student in my department about a possible collaboration when we noticed the television. One of our colleagues was on the Iowa City news providing historical context about the ongoing crisis in Palestine and Israel. Then, even more unexpectedly, a student from my previous…
BY RUBÉN MARTINEZ Crises in intellectual and religious thought have been opportunities for the reformulation of the basic principles and ideas of existing bodies of knowledge for decades. In the 1920s and 1930s, legal realism raised the specter of the destructive character of accepted theories of law. In the 1960s, Vatican II, the twenty-first Roman…