By Robert Warrior, Director of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign As the one-year anniversary of the debacle over the aborted appointment of Steven Salaita at Illinois approached, Inside Higher Education published an op-ed by former AAUP president Cary Nelson spelling out the lessons he contends we can all learn from…
Joint Statement of the UW-Milwaukee AAUP, UW-Whitewater AAUP, and UW-Madison AAUP executive committees to the UW System Tenure Policy Task Force. Milwaukee, Whitewater, and Madison, 17 September 2015 The University of Wisconsin has a one hundred year-long tradition of upholding the principles of academic freedom and shared governance as set forth by the American Association…
This guest post is by Michael J. Clark, Associate Professor of English and Director, Center for Public Humanities at Portland State University. The recent fundraising contretemps at Portland State University has embarrassed the institution, along with its many committed administrators, donors, faculty, and staff. While the failures in the oversight process by university fundraising executives have been chronicled by…
The Hindu American Foundation[i] (HAF) Board of Directors notes an anonymous[ii] posting on this blog site on September 16, 2015, ostensibly representing over one hundred scholars with expertise in South Asia that co-signed a statement[iii] also previously posted here. After publicly calling for a debate and spirited conversation over the upcoming visit of Indian Prime…
Over the Labor Day weekend, most signatories of the “Faculty Statement on Narendra Modi’s Visit to Silicon Valley” received threats from individuals in South Africa and Canada and email harassment from the Hindu Vivek Kendra, a Hindu nationalist organization affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) of which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a member. Several letter signatories have also been targeted…
In March, New York University professor Andrew Ross was stopped from boarding a flight to Abu Dhabi, where NYU has a campus and where Ross had intended to conduct research. The NYU administration has maintained that its Abu Dhabi campus will observe the AAUP’s principles on academic freedom and that all faculty and students will…
Guest blogger Lyn S. Graybill had earlier taught in West Africa as a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Fourah Bay College of the University of Sierra Leone. When the plane landed in Abidjan in August, I was excited. I had been accepted under a three year contract to teach Political Science courses at the International University of Grand-Bassam,…
September 1, 2015: When we released our letter on August 27, 2015 we had 125 signers. Despite the intimidation and harassment we have received at this blog site and elsewhere, more faculty have written to us asking that their names be included in the list of signatories–we now number 135. We are heartened by our…
By Andrew Scheinman The fallout at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) continues unabated: the Chancellor and Provost have both “stepped down,” and Steven Salaita’s legal team’s added destruction of evidence claims to their lawsuit. Here in Urbana-Champaign we’re having a “red soybeans” moment, what with the show-trials and blood sports already occurring and, no…
As faculty who engage South Asia in our research and teaching, we write to express our concerns about the uncritical fanfare being generated over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Silicon Valley to promote “Digital India” on September 27, 2015. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Silicon Valley highlights the role of a country that…