BY ALAN SINGER Academic freedom is the most sacred tradition in American universities. Academic freedom generally ensures that “both faculty members and students can engage in intellectual debate without fear of censorship or retaliation” and “establishes a faculty member’s right to remain true to his or her pedagogical philosophy and intellectual commitments.” Although K–12 teachers…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF In my new Journal of Academic Freedom article, “The Nondebate about Critical Race Theory and Our American Moment,” I discuss battles over the past in the context of the US reckoning with truth, reconciliation, collective knowledge, and the pursuit of an inclusive, equitable democracy. These battles at the intersection of past,…
POSTED BY THE AAUP We are pleased to announce the publication of volume 13 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. Our fall 2021 call for papers, “Memory Laws or Gag Laws? Disinformation Meets Academic Freedom,” invited scholarly responses to the wave of legislation seeking to ban or restrict teaching about race and racism. As…
BY JOHN K. WILSON A conference on academic freedom being held this weekend at Stanford has spurred controversy over its perceived conservative bias and closed format. A group of more than fifty Stanford academics signed “A Closed Conference on Academic Freedom is a Contradiction,” a statement denouncing the conference for its lack of public access.…
BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE For ten years before I retired at the end of 2021, I regularly taught a course called Corporate Power in America. The course examined how corporations shape politics, culture, and everyday life in the United States. I sometimes used my own university, North Carolina State, as an example of how corporate partnerships…
BY PEDRO GARCÍA-CARO The University of Oregon’s Office of the Provost will host an online conference devoted to “Academic Freedom and the Public University” on Friday, October 14, 2022. Building on the university’s public defense of academic freedom, we invite faculty and administrators from other colleges and universities to participate. This conference will focus on…
BY JOAN W. SCOTT In the annals of academic freedom, Chandler Davis (Chan, as he was known to family and friends), who died last month, was a towering figure. His principled refusal to comply (on First Amendment grounds) with a HUAC investigation of communism at the University of Michigan, led to his dismissal from the…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of an address delivered remotely, via Zoom, to the concluding session of a conference, “Universities at the Crossroads: Academic Freedom in a Changing World,” at GAU-Georgian American University, Tbilisi, Georgia, on October 1. Let me begin by thanking the organizers of this most important and interesting conference…
BY JENNIFER RUTH I was happy on Thursday to see the AAUP statement — reproduced below — on the University of Idaho’s attempt to enforce “neutrality” on the topic of abortion among its faculty when they are in the classroom. I was stunned when I read about the University of Idaho administration’s “guidance” to maintain…
BY KEVIN HOWLEY Call me cynical, but any piece of legislation or policy prescription that receives bipartisan support these days gives me the willies. When Democrats and Republicans agree on anything, it usually involves bloated military budgets or, in the case of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill, doubling down on roads and bridges in the…