This morning, Sept. 11, the University of Illinois Board of Trustees will meet in Urbana, and the trustees show no signs of backing down from their support for the firing of Steven Salaita. But the protests continue: at noon, the Campus Faculty Association and other campus unions and students will hold a rally at UIUC.…
Two days ago I posted a piece on this blog that asked, “Is ‘Incivility’ the New Communism?” In that post I suggested that recent attempts to enforce standards of “civility” at colleges and universities, often, as in the Salaita case at Illinois and the Marzec incident in Ohio, in response to pro-Palestinian expression, recalled previous…
Steven Salaita issued the following statement today in a press conference near the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. For more about his case, visit the Center for Constitutional Rights. My name is Steven Salaita. I am a professor with an accomplished scholarly record; I have been a fair and devoted teacher to hundreds of undergraduate and…
During the great red scare of the late 1940s and 1950s, many otherwise “liberal” politicians and, sadly, more than a few academics argued that faculty members who were Communists (actually in practice those who declined to publicly state they were not Communists or even those who refused to denounce others) forfeited the right to academic…
This report was drafted by a subcommittee of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure in August 2014 and has been approved by Committee A. A current threat to academic freedom in the classroom comes from a demand that teachers provide warnings in advance if assigned material contains anything that might trigger difficult emotional responses…
Steven Salaita will be speaking in Urbana tomorrow, Tues. Sept 8, at a 12:30pm press conference at the University YMCA, 1001 S Wright St. The press conference will follow an 11:30am student walkout and rally on the quad. The press conference will feature several speakers: Professor Steven Salaita Professor Robert Warrior, director of American Indian Studies…
By Marjorie Heins, founder of the Free Expression Policy Project and author of Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge. By now, the controversy over University of Illinois Chancellor Phyllis Wise’s August 1, 2014 decision to terminate the faculty appointment of Professor Steven Salaita has gone viral. A multitude…
The influence of outside money on education has always been strong–and fighting it is one of the reasons the AAUP came into existence. Rarely, though, do we educators have real power over the source of that money. In the case of Pearson, however, we can have just that. The company makes a good deal of…
This is a guest post by Tim Shiell, a contributor to the newest issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom. Shiell is a Professor of Philosophy and founder and Associate Director of the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. He primarily teaches ethics courses and researches issues at the intersection of law, ethics and…
This is a guest post by Jenny Bossaller, a contributor to the newest issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom. Professor Bossaller teaches library and information science at the University of Missouri. She studies social aspects of information access and use, informed by critical theory and concentrating on social justice. Jenna Kammer, an instructional designer and doctoral student…