BY TIRIEN ANGELA STEINBACH Tirien Angela Steinbach is the executive director of the East Bay Community Law Center, the community-based clinic for Berkeley Law School, where she graduated from law school in 1999. Since its founding in 1988 by law students at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, EBCLC has become the largest provider…
BY PATRICIA MCGUIRE Patricia McGuire is President of Trinity Washington University in Washington, D.C. In 2010 she was the recipient of the AAUP’s Alexander Meiklejohn Award, given to an American college or university administrator or trustee, or to a board of trustees as a group, in recognition of an outstanding contribution to academic freedom. At…
BY WENDY LYNNE LEE There is a great deal to be said about the rise of the Alt-Right over this past year, and while I understand the argument for identifying its platform with the ascent of white supremacism, I’d argue that “Alt-Right” encompasses something far more ambitious and dangerous, especially with respect to the country’s…
BY JUDITH BUTLER Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of the Berkeley Faculty Association and the AAUP. The following is the slightly edited text of remarks she delivered December 4 at a forum sponsored by the Berkeley Academic Senate, “Perspectives on Freedom…
BY NANCY LONG In 2014, the AAUP joined a nationwide effort to obtain an exemption to the copyright laws that protect authors’ rights to fair use in the digital age. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) imposes criminal and civil liability on creators who circumvent technologies like encryption that protect copyrighted works. This poses a problem…
BY WENDY BROWN Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of the Berkeley Faculty Association. The following is the text of her speech today at the NO to the Grad Tax walkout rally in Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza. It is hard to…
BY LESLIE BARY Guest blogger Leslie Bary is District V Representative to the National Council of the AAUP and Secretary, Louisiana Conference. She teaches Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Louisiana. During the recent meeting of National Council of the AAUP I thought about quitting. The national leadership is obviously not interested in…
BY AMY HAGOPIAN AND EVA CHERNIAVSKY Recent news reports confirm what we’ve suspected: hate crimes in the U.S. are up. (Hate crimes are those crimes that target people based on their race, religion, sexuality, disability, or national origin.) Last July, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) reported more than 940 potential bias incidents targeting Muslims just during…
BY ALTHA CRAVEY I’ve been attending UNC Board of Governors’ meetings for about three years. I knew it was important to understand the Board’s increasing willingness to interfere in campus affairs across the state. The Board had already ceased being a bi-partisan Board with equal numbers of Republican and Democratic members, a “gentleman’s agreement” that…
BY MICHAEL BEHRENT The “free speech” policy currently under consideration by the University of North Carolina Board of Governors could impose a “chill” on “constitutionally protected speech” on UNC campuses, according to a prominent First Amendment Scholar. Officers of the North Carolina Conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) recently spoke with Professor William P. Marshall…