Recently, news about a set of demands by activist students at Clemson University concerned about racism and intolerance spread like wildfire across the internet when a group of 110 faculty and staff published a letter in the student newspaper endorsing those demands. These students and faculty were accused by various conservative websites of wanting to…
By Bill V. Mullen Arizona State Ethnic Studies Professor Lee Bebout is under attack by a white supremacist group called the “National Youth Front” for teaching a course at his University called “U.S. Race Theory and the Problem of Whiteness.” Lee was my student at Purdue University, where he earned his Ph.D in American Studies.…
Recently considerable attention has been paid on this blog and elsewhere to potential threats to academic freedom posed by the undue influence of outside donors on scholarship. One thinks immediately, of course, of efforts by the Koch brothers at Florida State and elsewhere to fund academic positions that reflect their personal ideology and of the…
In response to Steven Salaita’s lawsuit yesterday, the University of Illinois administration issued a statement (copied in full below). Many claims in the U of I statement are incorrect, and others seem to confess to precisely the punishment of political speech that Salaita’s lawsuit is based upon. The U of I statement claims that Salaita’s tweets…
I would like to add a few items to John Wilson’s fine summary of the law suit filed in US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois on behalf of Steven Salaita. The Center for Constitutional Law and the Chicago civil rights law firm Loevy and Loevy have been providing legal counsel to Professor Salaita. The…
Steven Salaita filed a lawsuit today in a federal district court against the University of Illinois trustees and top administrators, seeking reinstatement and damages because of his dismissal. The lawsuit makes many counts against the University of Illinois, including federal violations of the First Amendment (“firing him for his political speech”), procedural due process (“summarily stripping…
The Center for Constitutional Rights has been providing legal counsel to Professor Steven Salaita who returned a signed contract to teach in the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Tomorrow this intrepid organization is announcing a press call to inform the public of a “new development” in the Salaita summary dismissal case. I presume…
John Wilson’s post containing the letter from the national AAUP to the Marquette administration somewhat clarifies several of the issues with McAdams—that is, clarifies the issues without presuming to resolve them. The university’s position has become that McAdams has repeatedly referred to students by name in his personal blog or other public communications–not simply that…
Last week, AcademeBlog posted a letter from Daniel Maguire about the John McAdams suspension by Marquette University, and an essay by Martin Kich about it. The following letter from Gregory Scholtz of the AAUP was sent today to Marquette and posted by McAdams on his blog. January 26, 2015 Dr. Michael R. Lovell President Marquette…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise fired Steven Salaita for extramural utterances on Twitter. She gave an interview for the influential The News-Gazette: no other paper has pipelines to the university administration as does the Champaign-Urbana paper. In her interview she rather cavalierly dismissed the impact of a possible American Association of University Professors censure. She…