BY JENNIFER RUTH Legislative acts against the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) are blatant and egregious violations of academic freedom, as academic freedom has been defined by the AAUP from its inception in 1915. How did we get to this moment in which the state’s attempted interference in education rivals the McCarthy Era in…
BY JENNIFER RUTH The far right has made critical race theory (CRT) one of the most polarizing issues in a deeply polarized country. And this is precisely what the architect of the anti-CRT media campaign Christopher Rufo intended. In March, he tweeted: We have successfully frozen their brand—’critical race theory’—into the public conversation and…
BY JENNIFER RUTH The easiest way to attract eyeballs to a story about academia is to say that the sky is falling on academic freedom. But is this the most accurate way to frame what’s currently happening in higher education? In “Academic Freedom Is on the Ropes,” his recent article in The Chronicle of Higher…
BY JENNIFER RUTH UNC-CH Board of Trustees’ decision to deny Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure over the explicit recommendation of the university’s faculty and administration dramatically illustrates the danger of giving Boards authority over academic hiring. (They offered her a five year position, with the possibility of a tenure review during that period.) In…
BY JENNIFER RUTH If you haven’t yet read Silke-Maria Weineck’s May 20 article in the Chronicle, “The Tenure Denial of Nikole Hannah-Jones is Craven and Dangerous,” please go do so. The University of Michigan professor of German and comparative literature minces no words, as her first two sentences make immediately clear: The news that the University…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH This is the first in a series of posts attempting to articulate lessons from the last decade of polarization. The series is entitled “What Have We Learned?” but I’m keenly aware that the “we” is highly ambiguous and mostly fictional. We are not one group and there is no consensus on…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In 2016, right after the Presidential election, I wrote on this blog: Nobody has a crystal ball but given the president-elect’s words and acts during the campaign—not to mention his seedy experiment in higher education—we would be fools not to expect an attack on the liberal institutions of shared governance and academic…
BY ALANA LENTIN AND CO-SIGNATORIES This open letter was originally published on openDemocracy on November 5 and is republished here with permission from the author. A critical response to the Manifesto signed by over 100 French academics and published in the newspaper Le Monde on 2 November 2020, after the assassination of the school teacher, Samuel…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH The following is a call to action shared by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) Organizing Collective regarding the censorship by Zoom and Facebook of an online event at San Francisco State University. Read a previous blog post about it by John Wilson and others…
BY J. MOUFAWAD-PAUL Alain Badiou once remarked that philosophy was “democratic” insofar as anyone is capable of critical thinking, but “undemocratic” because the pursuit of truth is not the same as voting according to one’s subjective opinion. In my opinion, this position is the basis for critical thinking and critical scholarship––anyone is capable of critical…