BY FRANK BALDWIN The Hollywood Ten knew they were on a blacklist. The House Un-American Activities Committee held televised hearings to vilify screenwriters and other cinema professionals and cited them for contempt of Congress. Studio executives fired the group in a press release, a warning to the film industry that subversives were not employable. Public…
BY JOHN STREAMAS After writing my Journal of Academic Freedom article, “A Vision for Scholar-Activists of Color,” I learned that my university has launched a new campaign to “recruit and retain” a diverse faculty, and now I serve on a subcommittee. At the same time it is also redefining standards for school-wide curricular requirements, and…
BY CHRISTOPHER S. ROSE Christopher S. Rose is a postdoctoral fellow with the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His 2019 dissertation, “On the Home Front: Food, Medicine, and Disease in World War I Egypt,” examines the impact of the war on the Egyptian civilian population. The following, which began…
BY JOHN F. COVALESKIE In “Speech, Academic Freedom, and Privilege,” in the current issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom, I argue that “colleges and universities should actively place themselves on the side of victims of systems of oppression.” Over the last couple of generations, a movement has developed to make college campuses more welcoming…
BY JUDY ROHRER It feels like every week there is a new case of an instructor being fired, released, or not renewed because of some (usually progressive) political statement or action. The increasing number of us in untenured and contingent positions find ourselves self-censoring in meetings, stressing over student evaluations, second-guessing our political activism, habitually…
BY RACHEL IDA BUFF We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 10 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. The journal features recent scholarship on academic freedom and its relation to contemporary crises of austerity, shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining. This year’s contributors draw connections between the multiple frequencies of bullying present on…
BY KATHERINE FRANKE AND MICHAEL ALTMAN-LUPU We have a message for Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar: welcome to the blacklist. You have joined a growing group of human rights defenders who have been denied entry to Israel and Palestine by the Israeli government because we dared to argue that Israel should comply with international…
BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN The right has recently adopted the language of “viewpoint diversity” in their critique of allegedly liberal professors. “Diversity” sounds nice (how could one be against it?) and, coupled with “viewpoint,” has a ring of freedom about it. But this rhetoric barely masks the intent: to justify hiring conservative faculty and creating conservative…
BY TOM DISCENNA AND AMY POLLARD Through no fault of the AAUP, its slogan “One Hundred Years, One Faculty” is too often belied in practice. The effect of state labor law, historical exigencies, and deeply entrenched attitudes has meant that in many places tenure-track (TT) and non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty are organized in separate unions. In…