The Center for Constitutional Rights has announced that a federal judge has ordered the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to release long sought after e-mail. Steven Salaita’s attorneys have attempted, under the Freedom of Information Act, to obtain e-mail relevant to the summary dismissal and firing of the tenured associate professor in the American Indian…
Chancellor Rebecca Blank of the University of Wisconsin-Madison shared the following message by email with faculty on June 9 ahead of an emergency meeting of the Faculty Senate. The message was also posted on a web page maintained by the University and devoted to budget issues. As we prepare to meet, I want to again…
The following is the text of a statement released yesterday by Chancellor Rebecca Blank of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. It is encouraging that the Chancellor pledges consistency with AAUP policies. It remains to be seen, however, whether or not Wisconsin politicians will permit that. Chancellor Blank’s reference to AAUP should remind us of the…
When Clark Ross sent me “Toward a New Consensus for Tenure in the Twenty-First Century” for possible inclusion in Academe, I was immediately interested. Not only was I seeing the ramping up of attacks on tenure but I have always felt the system too weak, if anything. My family moved every couple of years as I…
By Andrew Scheinman Two weeks ago I wrote a short post for academeblog.org discussing the facts I’d learned by filing Freedom-of-Information-Act (FOIA) with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) on the Steven Salaita Affair, a post in which I also considered the follow-up investigations into that Affair by the UIUC Committee on Academic Freedom and…
Laura McKenna has written an excellent article for The Atlantic, titled “The Cost of an Adjunct.” I include the paragraph that references the AAUP’s analysis of the contingent component of the professoriate. Ms McKenna, however, is somewhat confused about the estimated percentages of tenured, tenure track, full-time “term” appointments, and part-time faculty. The AAUP summary states…
This is a guest post by John McNay, a contributor to the May–June issue of Academe. McNay is a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati–Blue Ash. A specialist on the Cold War, he has published books and articles on that period, but his most recent book is Collective Bargaining and the Battle of Ohio: The…
Since today is Bertrand Russell’s birthday (he was born in 1872), I wanted to share this short segment from my dissertation on the history of academic freedom about Russell’s firing from CCNY and the first court case to mention the words “academic freedom”: A turning point in academic freedom came in 1940. That year marked the…
By Andrew Scheinman A few weeks ago, the AAUP released its Report on the Steven Salaita affair at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), in which it concluded that UIUC and its Chancellor Phyllis Wise violated Salaita’s academic freedom and committed serious breaches of governance when they “un-hired” Salaita by Wise’s not forwarding his hire…