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…
BY MYIA CLARISSE WILLIAMS AND VERNON C. LINDSAY One “big beautiful bill” has introduced ugly stress responses and expanded job duties among diverse higher education practitioners. Current provisions impose additional limits on Grad PLUS and Parent PLUS loans. Federal loan restrictions, the loss of DEI initiatives, and other meaningful programs that impact student retention also…
BY CATHERINE D’IGNAZIO As a professor at MIT, I find myself navigating strange waters these days. Last semester, I advised the thesis of a student who left the country because she did not feel welcome in the United States (and she is a citizen). I listened to exceptional students from around the world tell me…
BY AARON NISENSON The Trump administration has successfully buried a key component of the Columbia settlement agreement. The focus on monetary damages paid by the university and restrictions on campus protests and diversity policies obscures the Trump administration’s imposition of the right to interfere directly in university admissions, hiring, and promotion decisions. The Trump administration…