BY JOAN W. SCOTT This essay is adapted from the author’s contribution to a forum the Johns Hopkins University AAUP chapter organized to discuss Lisa Siraganian’s Academe article “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity.” As with so many other liberal principles, the Right has seized and perverted the seemingly benign pluralism implied by “viewpoint diversity” to…
BY LAURIE ESSIG On Wednesday, October 1, the Department of Education sent nine universities a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” The document asks universities to comply with a variety of restrictions like capping the number of international students and not considering factors like race or gender in hiring and admissions. More ominously, the…
BY ERIC J. WEINER Although Lisa Siraganian’s recent article ”Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity” includes important considerations for the heterodox academic community, her theses do more to distort the intentions and purposes of heterodoxical teaching and learning than to illuminate its potential conflicts and contradictions. Siraganian’s general critique of “viewpoint diversity” is that it is…
BY JOHN WARNER AND ANNA FEDER The following is a repost of a piece that originally appeared on “Academic Freedom on the Line,” a Substack run by Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom fellow John Warner. The past few weeks have seen a volume of violations of academic freedom not seen since the Red…
BY WILLIAM MATTHEW MCCARTER For more than fifty years, I’ve been learning. For more than twenty years, I’ve been teaching. If at this stage I can’t profess something worth hearing, then I ought to quit and sell insurance. Students don’t pay for PowerPoints or rubrics. They pay for professors who profess. The word itself comes…
BY IAN FINSETH The following is an imaginary communiqué from a fictitious administrator of an invented university to its faculty. It is satire (one hopes). Dear colleagues: Here at the University of the Southern Upper Midwest, we know that our customers don’t pay tuition for such woo-woo things like expanding their intellectual horizons, developing a…
BY DALE E. MILLER In “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity,” Professor Lisa Siraganian throws down a gauntlet. After offering “seven theses against viewpoint diversity in any of its guises,” she writes that “if viewpoint diversity means committing oneself to a robust debate about truth and values, then the movement should be open to responding to…
BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE Most Americans are accustomed to authoritarianism by virtue of their daily experiences in the workplace. Managers make, interpret, and enforce the rules by which private companies operate; they say what goes, and they can use force to impose their will. Employees who resist can be disciplined or fired, often without due process…
BY RACHEL BOUVIER Act I: Collateral Damage The letter came by FedEx. Inside: A formal notification that my tenured position as an economics professor had been eliminated—the second time in a matter of months my line had been retrenched, along with fifty colleagues and entire departments. The first had been noisy and public. The second…
This blog post originally appeared on Academic Freedom on the Line, the Substack newsletter of the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF). We are republishing it here with the author’s permission. BY JOHN WARNER I want to believe at this point that I am immune to shocks to the system when it comes…