Challenging Calls for Civility

BY RESHMI DUTT-BALLERSTADT We find ourselves living in a precarious space and time within our institutions where suddenly there has been a resurgence in appeals to civility codes (that perhaps started with Steven Salaita’s firing from University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, in August 2014 as a result of his tweets).  Following the election of Donald…

Dispatch From the War About General Education

BY HARRY HELLENBRAND [Ed. note: Harry Hellenbrand was provost and interim president at California State University, Northridge (CSUN).  A little more than a year ago the Chancellor of the California State University system (CSU) issued two executive orders governing general education and remediation. The directives, prepared and released without appropriate faculty input, were immediately controversial,…

Preventing Workplace Bullying

BY LEAH P. HOLLIS My Journal of Academic Freedom article “The Ironic Interplay of Free Speech and Silencing discusses academic freedom in the context of workplace bullying. In it, I consider the need to balance free speech rights with an individual’s right to a psychologically safe workplace. During my campus visits and talks about workplace…

Scrabble tiles spelling out "free speech."

Journal of Academic Freedom Explores Free Speech

BY RACHEL IDA BUFF We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 9 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 volume focuses on the intersections of academic freedom and free speech,…

A Critique of “Standing with Professional Ethics”

BY DAVID PALUMBO-LIU I appreciate the opportunity to respond to Professor Hank Reichman’s criticism of our statement in support of Professor John Cheney-Lippold’s refusal to write a letter of recommendation for a student wishing to participate in a Study Abroad program in Israel. Cheney-Lippold cites as his reason his commitment to the Boycott, Divestment, and…

Standing with John Cheney-Lippold

BY Richard Falk, Cynthia Franklin, Terri Ginsberg, Salah Hassan, David Klein, Adam Miyashiro, Bill V. Mullen, David Palumbo-Liu, Andrew Ross, and Snehal Shingavi John Cheney-Lippold, an associate professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor, has been criticized by some supporters of the State of Israel for declining to write a letter of recommendation…