The Center for Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s law school has been eliminated by the Board of Governors. As the AAUP noted in a statement opposing this move, “centers must be free to sponsor curricular and extracurricular programs and provide services to the public across the broadest…
Marquette University Dean Richard Holz has written a letter to Professor John McAdams, announcing that university will revoke his tenure and fire him. The AAUP recently wrote a letter to Marquette objecting to the suspension of McAdams without adequate cause or hearing. This latest development is far more alarming. AAUP regulations, and Marquette’s own policies,…
Last week, I reported on the case of Western Illinois University suspending the Western Courier editor-in-chief Nicholas Stewart because he sold video he took of a riot on campus. This week, WIU decided to reinstate Stewart. WIU student services vice-president Gary Biller informed Stewart, “a preliminary review … has revealed that no complete policy exists within…
UPDATE: I’ll be speaking at a panel on “Shared Governance and Academic Freedom: Where Are We Now?” at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Weds. Feb. 11, 7:30pm @ University YMCA, 1001 S. Wright St., Champaign, sponsored by the Campus Faculty Association. On a related topic, the AAUP chapter at UIUC has issued these two statements on…
Two decades ago, I wrote a book titled “The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education.” Two decades later, the myth continues. Today, the proponent is Jonathan Chait, who warns us in New York Magazine of this dire evil resurrected from the distant past: Political correctness. According to Chait, “Political correctness is…
Recently, news about a set of demands by activist students at Clemson University concerned about racism and intolerance spread like wildfire across the internet when a group of 110 faculty and staff published a letter in the student newspaper endorsing those demands. These students and faculty were accused by various conservative websites of wanting to…
In response to Steven Salaita’s lawsuit yesterday, the University of Illinois administration issued a statement (copied in full below). Many claims in the U of I statement are incorrect, and others seem to confess to precisely the punishment of political speech that Salaita’s lawsuit is based upon. The U of I statement claims that Salaita’s tweets…
Steven Salaita filed a lawsuit today in a federal district court against the University of Illinois trustees and top administrators, seeking reinstatement and damages because of his dismissal. The lawsuit makes many counts against the University of Illinois, including federal violations of the First Amendment (“firing him for his political speech”), procedural due process (“summarily stripping…
Last fall, AcademeBlog reported on the case of Robin Meade, an adjunct instructor and head of the adjunct faculty union at Moraine Valley Community College in Illinois, who was fired in 2013 and banned from campus because she wrote a letter critical of how the administration treated adjuncts. Meade wrote an essay about her experience. On…
Nicholas Stewart, a student at Western Illinois University, and editor-in-chief of its student newspaper, the Western Courier, was suspended from his position last week by the administration, and is being brought up on charges of violating the Code of Student Conduct because he recorded video of a riot on campus, and sold that video to…