The sudden resignation yesterday by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign chancellor Phyllis Wise now has a clear explanation: the U of I announced today that Wise and other administrator were using personal email accounts to engage in secret discussions about sensitive matters, and released new emails about the Salaita case. In one email to a…
Steven Salaita, a tenured associate professor in the American Indian Studies program, was fired a year ago with a summary dismissal for tweets that were construed as lacking civility. A federal judge, Harry D. Leinenweber of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, has ruled against the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign…
The most recent issue of Academe displays on its cover a Bob Dylan lyric: “I’ll Tell It and Think It and Speak It and Breathe It.” An image appears at the upper left-hand corner of this webpage. Its provenance is the epic protest song, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Editor Aaron Barlow deftly situates the song on the cusp of the…
On July 9, 2015, the AAUP sent a letter to Louisiana State University (LSU) President and Chancellor Dr. F. King Alexander indicating that a supplemental report to the public record relating to the LSU administration’s existing presence on the AAUP’s censure list had been authorized. This letter came in response to the administration’s dismissal of Associate Professor…
The following statement was approved by the Board of Directors of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) during the Annual Conference of the American Library Association, June 2015. Librarians have a long history and practice of defending the free expression of ideas. The “Code of Ethics of American Library Association” (2008) states that…
Cary Nelson has an essay at InsideHigherEd today (along with Michael Rothberg) on the Salaita case. Here’s my comment on Nelson’s piece. First, I must note that absolutely nothing in Nelson’s essay is relevant to the actual reasons given by the chancellor and the trustees for firing Salaita. They have never questioned Salaita’s academic credentials,…
The following essay originally was published on the anthropology blog Savage Minds. By Martin F. Manalansan IV and Ellen Moodie* The crisis at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has become known as “the Salaita case,” or just “Salaita.” In common parlance the surname refers not so much to the Palestinian American literary scholar…
Last week I posted an entry on this blog encouraging readers to read an article on academic freedom and tenure by Christopher Newfield, published in Inside Higher Ed. Now Newfield has posted a kind of follow up piece, entitled Academic Freedom and the Very Serious People on the Remaking the University blog, which he edits…
Yesterday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan delivered a “major” address on higher education. As Inside Higher Ed’s account put it, his call for “a greater focus on student outcomes at colleges was an effort to pivot away from discussions that he said are focused too narrowly on the burden of student loan debt.” Duncan argues:…
By Alice Dreger, reprinted from AliceDreger.com. Last night I dreamed I had a date with Donald Trump. We were in the Trump International Hotel and Tower® in Chicago, in a ballroom that looks out over the river. I was wearing my black Banana Republic dress, the one I wore to the Guggenheim Fellowship reception in 2008,…