The following is the text of a talk that I delivered on March 30, 2015 at Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio, as part of the Spring Semester Centennial Speakers Series. The series celebrates the centennial of the AAUP and the contributions of all those who have served within leadership positions in the WSU AAUP…
Tenured Associate Professor Steven Salaita, last night, filed a response to the University of Illinois motion to dismiss his civil rights lawsuit against the Board of Trustees, University of Illinois officials and donors. The response lays out the underlying constitutional, contractual and tort-based claims at the heart of the lawsuit and addresses how the complaint alleges…
If college campuses are to be safe spaces, the goal needs to be to make them safe for everyone—even faculty. With tenure reduced and enfeebled and secret investigations commonplace, I have seen seasoned professors tremble with fear. They feel unsafe and unsupported by administrators and staff and have seen how processes meant to protect can…
Writing under the pseudonym “Aurora Dagny,” a Canadian activist offers four pieces of advice for those working for any sort of cause: “Embrace humility…. Question yourself as fiercely as you question society.” “Treat people as individuals. For instance, don’t treat every person who belongs to an oppressed group as an authoritative mouthpiece of that group as…
The following is the text of a statement released earlier today by the American Association of University Professors on the denial of entry to the emirate of Abu Dhabi to NYU Professor Andrew Ross. Not long after the statement was issued, news arrived of another incident involving a faculty member in Abu Dhabi. According to…
Andrew Bacevich, political-science professor at Boston University, has posted a new essay, “Rationalizing Lunacy: The Intellectual as Servant of the State.” It’s a look back at the role of the public intellectual within the U.S. federal government since the time of the New Deal, focusing particularly on their impact on foreign policy, the Vietnam War in specific…
Alice Dreger has a new post on Retraction Watch. She writes What are we to do? Well, I believe we as university-based researchers should at least be quite concerned when academics have to worry about being “off-brand.” We should, I think, be pretty agitated when a university professor has to pay $50,000 to defend his academic…
University of Oklahoma President David Boren has shut down the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house, ordered students living there to leave, and expelled two students for leading a racist chant. These actions are a violation of the University of Oklahoma’s rules and, as FIRE points out, punishing these students is “almost certainly unconstitutional.” Some might wonder:…
The Center for Constitutional Rights is reporting that Cornel West is boycotting, in solidarity protest, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign over the firing of tenured Associate Professor Steven Salaita for extramural utterances on Israel’s bombardment of Gaza last year: Dr. Cornel West Joins Boycott of Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign over Salaita Firing March 4, 2015, New York – Esteemed…