The News-Gazette of Champaign, Illinois published yesterday in its Sunday edition an op-ed I wrote on my interpretation of the American Association of University Professors censure of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The censure resulted from the summary dismissal of Associate Professor Steven Salaita for his tweets on the war in Gaza last summer. The paper supplied the…
The two great parts of American higher education are the students and the faculty. The administrators are only around to facilitate the learning of the former and the teaching and research of the latter. Or that’s the way we imagine it. Over the past fifty years, the students have become customers instead of learners and…
This comes from The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Louisiana State University system’s Board of Supervisors voted last week to uphold the firing of Teresa Buchanan, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction, based on accusations she had engaged in sexual harassment and violated the Americans With Disabilities Act. F. King Alexander, the system’s president, had…
John Wilson’s post on comedians who have been critical of college audiences is a terrific essay–one of the most incisively perceptive pieces on any topic that I have read this year. I would humbly add just a couple of observations of my own to the discussion that John’s essay should provoke. Provocative figures, including provocative…
Shortly after the AAUP’s annual membership meeting placed the administration of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) on its list of censured administration for its summary dismissal of Professor Steven Salaita in response to his anti-Israeli comments on Twitter, I received an email from an old friend from the California State University Academic Senate,…
1) Academic freedom is not to be compromised in collective bargaining agreements and faculty handbooks that perfunctorily affirm an institutional commitment to defend academic freedom, yet declare the faculty has a responsibility to be civil, accurate and professional in all matters. Conditionality in academic freedom statements is a ruse to sanction those who deviate from the…
It is often claimed that supporters of academic freedom and tenure, like the AAUP, are simply left-wing or liberal professors seeking to protect their own positions and privilege their own views. Those of us who know better realize how ridiculous this argument can be, but now, in the wake of Scott Walker’s attack on tenure…
If you have been following the controversy over the proposed Cohen-Tucker fellowship program the following announcement, issued today by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), which brings the controversy to a positive end, will interest you. If you didn’t follow this story see my previous posts here, here, here and here.…
President Timothy Killeen is completing his first month as leader of the University of Illinois system. In remarks before the Urbana-Champaign faculty Senate Executive Committee, he was rather cavalier about the AAUP censure vote last Saturday. Unlike Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise, who stated in a conciliatory tone that removal of censure was important, President Killeen, according to…
On June 2, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice, held a hearing on “First Amendment Protections on Public College and University Campuses.” The subcommittee received testimony from four witnesses: Greg Lukianoff, President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE); Kim Colby,…