By Sharon Ann Musher In the aftermath of the board of trustees’ vote at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to terminate Steven Salaita’s conditional job offer, the scholar of Arab-American literature is pursuing two options. He has engaged the Center for Constitution Rights to sue the university. And he has requested that the American…
Rudy Fichtenbaum, President American Association of University Professors While cases such as the ones I have been discussing receive lots of public attention, they pale in comparison a number of other threats to academic freedom, mainly the attacks on public sector unions and growing use of faculty who are hired on contingent contracts. In the…
Guest blogger Michael Behrent is an associate professor of history at Appalachian State University and President of the ASU Chapter of the AAUP. This was first published as a letter-to-the-editor of The Appalachian. College is one of the most thrilling times of your life: a time to learn, discover yourself, and forge lifelong relationships. If this is…
By Michael Rothberg [An earlier and shorter version of these remarks was first presented at the forum “Academic Freedom and Political Dissent,” which was sponsored by Illinois Faculty for Academic Freedom and Justice and took place on September 18, 2014 in Urbana’s Independent Media Center. The forum featured a lecture by Katherine Franke from Columbia Law School about…
By Jillian York, Director for International Freedom of Expression, Electronic Frontier Foundation Plenty has been written on the unceremonious “un-hiring” of Steven Salaita, a professor who gave up tenure at Virginia Tech to take a more suitable position at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The revocation of Salaita’s job offer—a day before he was set…
This article by Western Michigan University AAUP chapter president Lisa Minnick was originally posted at her website, where you can also see photos of the event. By Lisa Minnick I have written about higher education and about labor rights, mostly in the context of the abysmal state of affairs when it comes to the political climate here in Michigan.…
Steven Salaita issued the following statement today in a press conference near the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. For more about his case, visit the Center for Constitutional Rights. My name is Steven Salaita. I am a professor with an accomplished scholarly record; I have been a fair and devoted teacher to hundreds of undergraduate and…
By Marjorie Heins, founder of the Free Expression Policy Project and author of Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge. By now, the controversy over University of Illinois Chancellor Phyllis Wise’s August 1, 2014 decision to terminate the faculty appointment of Professor Steven Salaita has gone viral. A multitude…
One Adjunct’s Reflection on the 11th International Conference of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) By Chris Cruz-Boone In a candid moment at the COCAL XI debriefing, organizers admitted that the high cost of travel to the New York City location limited conference access for many adjuncts living on fixed incomes. I was fortunate…
Below is a Sept. 2 letter (read the full letter with footnotes here) from Katherine M. Franke, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University, to UIUC Chancellor Phyllis Wise. Dear Dr. Wise: Last June several University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty invited me to your campus as part of The Cultures of…