BY HENRY REICHMAN During his 50+ years on the AAUP staff Jordan E. Kurland, who died on Saturday at the age of 87, must have helped thousands of faculty members resist challenges to their academic freedom. Yet because he never sought the spotlight for himself, Jordan and his remarkable work remained largely unknown to most…
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a conservative group that has advocated increased activism by college and university trustees and a “return” to “traditional” curricula in Western Civilization and American military, constitutional, and diplomatic history (let’s put aside for now that, given the recent behavior of most trustee boards, these two goals may…
The Charles Koch Foundation has offered Western Carolina University a gift of $2 million in order to establish a Center of Free Enterprise. Mark Jamison, the retired postmaster of Webster, North Carolina, has an excellent op-ed piece in the Smoky Mountain News opposing the donation. He writes: The proposed $2 million gift from the Charles…
The following was written by Martin Luther King, Jr. and first published in the February 1947 edition of the Morehouse College Student Newspaper. King was 18 years old. As I engage in the so-called “bull sessions” around and about the school, I too often find that most college men have a misconception of the purpose…
The following appeared in the January 15 issue of University World News and has been highlighted in the weekly Academic Freedom Media Review published by Scholars at Risk, which tracks violations of academic freedom and civil liberties in colleges and universities around the world. While the AAUP does not generally take formal positions on violations…
Stefan Collini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge and author of the important book What Are Universities For?, has a wonderful review article in the London Review of Books responding to the Conservative British government’s proposal to establish a Teaching Excellence Framework. Responding specifically to a new Green Paper written by Jo…