Last week, AcademeBlog posted a letter from Daniel Maguire about the John McAdams suspension by Marquette University, and an essay by Martin Kich about it. The following letter from Gregory Scholtz of the AAUP was sent today to Marquette and posted by McAdams on his blog. January 26, 2015 Dr. Michael R. Lovell President Marquette…
Earlier this month, five professors at the University of Illinois (Nicholas Burbules, R.H. Campbell, Kim Graber, Joyce Tolliver, and Matthew Wheeler, referred to as the “Gang of Five”) wrote a response to the UIUC CAFT Report, criticizing it and defending the dismissal of Steven Salaita. The Gang of Five claims that they embrace the AAUP’s…
The debate over the firing of Steven Salaita is not over. The criticism of the University of Illinois continues, although many defenders of the chancellor and trustees wish people would stop talking about it. The Campus Faculty Association has started a petition calling for the U of I to follow the recommendations of the CAFT…
Richard Vedder argued at Forbes.com that in higher education, “the most invidious single violation of basic concepts of free expression of ideas is the attack on the Koch brothers, Charles and David.” This claim is absurd, since no one has sought to censor the Koch Brothers, and because their foundation has sought to limit academic…
The University of Illinois Board of Trustees today announced that it will never reconsider the dismissal of Steven Salaita, and it will not listen to any faculty committee about Salaita’s qualifications: “That decision is final.” According to the trustees, “The decision concerning Dr. Salaita was not reached hastily. Nor was it the result of external…
The Committee on Freedom of Expression at the University of Chicago has issued a report explaining why a university must have “lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation.” The Committee was apparently created partly in response to a petition by a group of University of Chicago students, asking that the Institute of Politics ban…
The CAFT report on the Salaita case has sparked another debate about whether donors influenced the decision, with Steven Lubet and Liel Leibovitz arguing that the report refutes the idea of donor influence, and Phan Nyugen and Peter Kirstein rejecting those arguments. In one sense, the question of whether Phyllis Wise was influenced by donors…
The Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure (CAFT), part of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Academic Senate, issued a report on Dec. 23 about the Steven Salaita case. The CAFT report makes some extraordinary good points, along with a few very bad arguments. Overall, though, it is a firm repudiation of the University of Illinois…
The Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has just issued a subcommittee “Report on the Investigation into the Matter of Steven Salaita.” The Report (see full PDF here) is a powerful critique of how the University of Illinois administration and trustees dealt with the Salaita case. The Report argues that…
In 1916, the New York Times denounced the newly-formed AAUP’s Declaration of Principles in an editorial that defined “Academic freedom” as “the inalienable right of every college instructor to make a fool of himself and of his college by…intemperate, sensational prattle about every subject under heaven, to his classes and to the public…” (Actually, that’s…