BY JENNIFER RUTH Last week, I interviewed Professor Shiu Wen-tang (許文堂), President of the Taiwan Association of University Professors. Given the attention in America paid to US Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit and the aftermath (namely, Chinese military aggression), it seemed an apt time to introduce readers to the faculty organization in Taiwan dedicated to Taiwan’s…
BY JENNIFER RUTH China’s retaliation for Nancy Pelosi’s trip continued last week, as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) launched a second wave of live fire drills around Taiwan. “China has threatened Taiwan militarily for years, and it continues to upgrade its efforts,” Taiwan’s foreign minister Joseph Wu said at a press conference on August 9th.…
BY JENNIFER RUTH The education gag orders sweeping red states are being challenged in the courts on First Amendment grounds. This makes sense and we must hope that all such challenges prove effective. The reality, though, is that the anti-CRT and “divisive concepts” legislation directly attacks academic freedom. As AAUP President Irene Mulvey recently tweeted…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In “Adjunct and Tenured Faculty Must Unite to Resist Pandemic Opportunism on Campus”, a piece I wrote recently for Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt and Bertin M. Louis Jr.’s “Challenging the Corporate University” special series in Truthout, I argued that “it has become clear that adjuncts and tenured faculty alike will only be able to…
Note: At the end of April, the editors of the Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, penned an editorial supporting BDS and Palestinian liberation. In response,150 members of the Harvard Faculty wrote a statement criticizing the editorial. Another group of faculty penned their own response, which was published in the Harvard Crimson. This letter is…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In “Academic Freedom: A Pilot Study of Faculty Views,” published in the collection Who’s Afraid of Academic Freedom? (2015), Jonathan R. Cole, Stephen Cole, and Christopher C. Weiss suggest that “an erosion of the norms of academic freedom and free inquiry has taken place at American universities and colleges.” They posit two…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom, Michael Bérubé and I argue that academic freedom is not free speech (thus, the title) and that it operates with a different set of rules and expectations. We further argue that those rules need firming up: When universities respected…
BY JENNIFER RUTH When I was a junior faculty member, one of my senior colleagues invited me to a regular happy hour he attended with Portland State’s top administrators. The man who was the provost at the time was there, as well as a head HR person, a legal affairs person, the director of facilities,…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In February, historian Ellen Schrecker and I called upon faculty to use the power we possess through shared governance to fight the education gag orders sweeping the country. In January, I commented here on how institutions in the south hesitate to pass resolutions out of fear of “poking the bear.” I am…