Florida’s and China’s Viewpoint Monitoring Laws
BY THOMAS A. BRESLIN Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and his allies have used conflict-of-interest policies meant to keep China from poaching American intellectual property to muzzle Florida’s public college and university professors. So doing, they’ve managed to deny the public access to the expertise of public university and college faculty members, threatened public health, put…
Diversity in a Precarious World
BY LOUIS HOWARD PORTER Why are we diversifying a profession that exploits a majority of its professionals? What are the consequences of diversifying a profession where many are either forced to leave it, or take jobs as contingent labor making poverty-level wages? Is the consequence of such diversification really “social justice”? Or is it exploitation…
What Instructors Need to Know about COVID-19 Risks
BY FRANK E. RITTER AND DONALD A. DONAHUE We will need to continue to protect ourselves from COVID-19, probably through spring 2022. Colleges and universities have long been recognized as places of increased risk for communicable diseases. While higher education has benefited from immunization mandates against “childhood diseases” in primary and secondary schools, they have…
Ross Douthat Wouldn’t Know a New College from an Old One
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…
A Campus President Defends Tenure
BY ROBERT A. SCOTT At the recent National Conservative Conference, the author J. D. Vance, a Yale Law School graduate and former investment banker who is running for the US Senate from Ohio, quoted former president Richard Nixon’s salvo that “the professors are the enemy.” He joins a chorus of those challenging the authority and…
Gainesville, We Have a Problem
BY STEVEN LUBET Three University of Florida political science professors have sued the university trustees and several officials for violations of the First Amendment and academic freedom, alleging that they had been prevented from “testifying on behalf of voting-rights groups in a lawsuit challenging Florida’s Senate Bill 90 (‘SB 90’).” In what appeared to be…
PEN America Report Warns About Dangers of Educational Gag Orders
BY PEN AMERICA A wave of alarming legislative efforts to limit teaching and learning on topics including racism, sexism, and American history represent a censorious drive to impose viewpoint and content-based restrictions on freedom of speech and thought in American schools and universities, PEN America said in a report released today. In the report, Educational…
Performing versus Supporting the Educational Mission of Colleges and Universities
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…
Not All Is Well That Ends Well
BY DANIEL A. SEGAL On April 15 of this year, Pitzer College’s Title IX Coordinator informed me that a student had filed a complaint against me alleging both “harassment on the grounds of sex/gender” and “harassment on the grounds of ancestry.” The case ended with a determination that there were no violations of policy, no…