By Michael Rothberg [An earlier and shorter version of these remarks was first presented at the forum “Academic Freedom and Political Dissent,” which was sponsored by Illinois Faculty for Academic Freedom and Justice and took place on September 18, 2014 in Urbana’s Independent Media Center. The forum featured a lecture by Katherine Franke from Columbia Law School about…
InsideHigherEd today features an essay I wrote about Kenneth Howell, an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois who was fired, and then re-hired, in 2010, after a complaint about an email he sent to his Catholicism class which included some rather bizarre anti-gay views. Last month, I wrote about a white supremacist who is a…
Three weeks ago I posted to this blog a piece I titled “And Now There’s a Blacklist?” In that post I reported that an organization called the AMCHA Initiative, which claims it is “dedicated to investigating, documenting, educating about, and combating antisemitism at institutions of higher education in America,” had published what was “perilously close”…
By Jillian York, Director for International Freedom of Expression, Electronic Frontier Foundation Plenty has been written on the unceremonious “un-hiring” of Steven Salaita, a professor who gave up tenure at Virginia Tech to take a more suitable position at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The revocation of Salaita’s job offer—a day before he was set…
I had originally begun politely with a news hook quoting William J. Bennett on the common core, and will return to it, but as things are in our society, I think the following will give the common core more publicity: As reported by Eric Owens, education editor of The Daily Caller, in “Common Core is…
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure is apparently investigating the Steven Salaita case. What will be achieved is unclear since the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, the highest unit an appointee can appeal a dismissal on campus, has already cast its unseemly vote to dismiss the professor eleven…
Hank Reichman, the First Vice-President of AAUP and a frequent contributor to this blog, is marking his retirement by teaching a seminar on the history of academic freedom in the American university. Unprompted, his provost handed him a sizable check and invited him to organize a broader symposium, a speakers series, on the history of…
A few days ago I posted a brief piece, “Which Banned Book Are You?“, that linked to a quiz posted by librarians at Columbus State Community College to promote the annual Banned Books Week, which runs through tomorrow. My post has since had over 5,000 visits and has been the most visited post on this…
There are certain debates in a representative democracy that are eternal for a reason–and that reason often lies the nature of humanity and human vanity. One of these debates, in the United States, was first apparent in the animosity between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. It was recapped a little less than a century ago in Walter Lippmann’s…
UPDATED ITINERARY SEPTEMBER 24, 2014: Professor Steven Salaita, who had been appointed as an associate professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is planning a five-day speaking tour in Chicago not only to seek a reversal of the sudden cancellation of his appointment, but also to defend other critical-thinking academicians who dare challenge the ideological preferences of chancellors,…