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…
University of Illinois emeritus professor Robert Weissberg published an essay this week with the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, a right-wing think tank, in which he argues about the Salaita case: “The trustees are not guilty of violating free speech; their sin is cowardice in overseeing the faculty. They did not perform…
Writing for the Boston Globe, Oliver Ortega has reported on the Lynn, Massachusetts, school district’s decision to sever ties with Gordon College, a Christian institution that has placed student teachers in the district’s classrooms for more than a decade. The tension between the college’s and the school district’s positions on the employment rights of gay,…
This is a guest post by Kenneth Garcia, a contributor to the newest issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom. Garcia is the associate director of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame, and author of the award-winning book Academic Freedom and the Telos of the Catholic University. Do we…
Below is a Sept. 2 letter (read the full letter with footnotes here) from Katherine M. Franke, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University, to UIUC Chancellor Phyllis Wise. Dear Dr. Wise: Last June several University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty invited me to your campus as part of The Cultures of…