POSTED BY MARTIN KICH When I started to draft this post, I saw the daily newsletter from Reason, which has this teaser: “On Thanksgiving, Be Grateful for Property Rights.” Really? In the current political climate, I doubt that property rights are the rights that most Americans are most concerned about preserving. I’m guessing that freedom…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Last week, the Nassau Community College Board of Trustees unanimously approved a new News Media Relations policy that is a tremendous victory for freedom of the press, reflecting the importance of the AAUP and other groups fighting for campus liberty. At the Nov. 13 Board meeting, President W. Hubert Keen declared, “We’ve…
BY ANNE SISSON RUNYAN As Committee W (the AAUP’s Committee on the Women in the Academic Profession) marks its hundredth year since its founding, it is worth reflecting on its role in the age of intersectionality. The rise of feminist intersectional scholarship and activism discussed in my piece on “What is Intersectionality and Why Does…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD Christopher Newfield is professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This is reposted from the Remaking the University blog. The biggest mainstream media higher ed story last week–and this–has been the lawsuit charging Harvard with discrimination against Asian American applicants. My piece on it has been delayed by…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a press statement released on Friday by the Purdue University chapter of the AAUP. It is followed by the full text of the resolution passed by the chapter. Members of Purdue University’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) passed a resolution at…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the sad news arrived of the passing of Bob O’Neil, founder of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Free Expression, former president of the University of Virginia and of the University of Wisconsin system, and prominent First Amendment scholar. Bob served three terms as general counsel of the AAUP and was chair…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN To restore the profession of teaching in the Colorado Community College System (CCCS), the Colorado Conference of the AAUP has released the first of a series of videos showcasing the mounting, explosive, labor exploitation issue facing the 13-college CCCS. The video, Secrets, Scams, and Scandals: The Dirty Little Secrets of the…
BY HANK REICHMAN On Tuesday of this week the national AAUP delivered a letter to the leaders of the Rutgers University AAUP-AFT chapter expressing concern that any discipline stemming from a report by that university’s Office of Employment Equity, which concluded that history professor James Livingston’s Facebook posts on gentrification “were not protected by the…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a letter sent by AAUP Associate Secretary Hans-Joerg Tiede to professors Deepa Kumar and David Hughes, President and Vice-President of the Rutgers University AAUP-AFT. The letter is followed by a statement issued by the AAUP-AFT Rutgers Executive Council. For additional background on this case see…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday, as expected, the U.S. Supreme Court in a narrow 5-4 ruling capped a week of outrageous decisions by declaring agency fee payments by non-union members unconstitutional in the public sector. The ruling, which overturned a unanimous 1977 decision supported by such conservative luminaries as William Rehnquist, Lewis Powell, and Warren Burger,…