BY THE NYU-AAUP EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE 10/23/2020 Today, Zoom unilaterally shut down a webinar hosted by the NYU chapter of the AAUP, and co-sponsored by several NYU departments and institutes. The webinar was scheduled to discuss the censorship, by Zoom and other big tech platforms, of an open classroom session last month at SFSU, featuring the…
BY GRAHAM A. PECK Graham Peck is the Wepner Distinguished Professor of Lincoln Studies in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Springfield. The following is a modified version of the Wepner Distinguished Professor Investiture Lecture, delivered Thursday, September 24, 2020. A video of the address is available here. In 2017, I…
BY DREW MCKEVITT Last week historian Lora Burnett at Collin College in Texas was the latest target of online harassment fomented by the website Campus Reform, only to be thrown under the bus by her administration in violation of its own academic freedom policies. Guest blogger Drew McKevitt, Associate Professor of History at Louisiana Tech…
BY CHARLIE TYSON AND NAOMI ORESKES A couple of years ago, we decided to look at the question of liberal bias in the American academy. Are American colleges and universities disproportionately liberal and biased against conservatives? For most conservatives, and even some liberals, the answer is obvious. We wanted to examine whether the claim was…
BY KIMBERLY HARDING Spring 2020 was the unanticipated semester. Few thought in January 2020 that we would be teaching remotely by the end of March. Even then, hope existed that Fall 2020 would emerge as a more “normal” semester. This hope has since been put to rest for most institutions of higher learning. During this…
BY THE NATIONAL COALITION AGAINST CENSORSHIP The National Coalition Against Censorship today sent this letter, co-signed by the AAUP, to Zoom, Facebook, and Youtube regarding the censorship of an event at San Francisco State University. October 8, 2020 Dear Mr. Yuan, Mr. Zuckerberg, and Ms. Wojcicki: As organizations dedicated to protecting freedom of expression, the…
BY SOCIOLOGICAL ORGANIZATION PRESIDENTS The following letter was sent on September 30 by presidents of sociological organizations to express concern about threatened consequences for two sociology professors who participated in September 8 and 9 #Scholarstrike activities. It was initially signed by twelve presidents, and an additional president signed on later. TO: President Michael K. Young…
BY DISARM PSU At Portland State University, students, faculty, staff, and our broader community have been engaged in seven years of organizing, protesting, and collaborating under an umbrella coalition called “Disarm PSU” since the 2014 decision by PSU to transform its Campus Public Safety Office (CPSO) into a sworn and armed police force. While many…
BY THE CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY HISTORY DEPARTMENT Responding to President Donald Trump’s September 17 attack on history that is not “patriotic”, and in particular, the “1619” feature in the New York Times, the Chapman University History Department decided to go public with their reply, posting it to The Panther, the university’s student newspaper. Under the heading,…
BY NAN ENSTAD Nearly every day there is bad news about draconian cuts to a college or a university system as the economic emergency prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic compounds decades of crisis in higher education in the United States. We can expect such cuts to continue and worsen unless we change course in how…