Last month, Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen, who should know better, described academic freedom as permitting “the airing and defense of any and all views.” It is not so simple as that, of course. As the 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure puts it, there are (as most of us know)…
Readers of this blog know that I have been reporting occasionally on the continuing conflict between faculty, staff, and students at City College of San Francisco (CCSF) and the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), which has threatened to revoke CCSF’s accreditation on what many — including San Francisco’s City Attorney and other…
Writing for Forbes, John Ebersole, the president of Excelsior College, has identifeid the following ten issues as the most significant issues facing higher education this year: 1. Cost. 2. Renewal of the Higher Education Act. 3. Workforce development. 4. Competency-based education. 5. Accreditation. 6. Assessment. 7. Quality assurance in non-institutional learning. 8. Recognition of the…
Cambridge University Press has decided not to publish a book about corruption in Russia by Karen Dawisha out of fears that British libel law would leave it vulnerable to litigation. In response to the letter from Cambridge University Press, Dawisha wrote the following open letter. By Karen Dawisha, Miami University Thank you for the recent letter…
An “On the Issues” Post from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org] _______________ The increasing awareness of—and outrage about–the size of the debt crushing college graduates is, we must hope, a sign that meaningful action to address it may be possible. The numbers alone are staggering. According to recent reports, the average…
This week the Roberts Court doubled down on its arguments that political contributions are simply a form of free expression and they neither distort the electoral process nor exert a corrupting influence on our elected officials. This week Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal filed a lawsuit against the progressive group MoveOn.org because it has paid for…
Peter Kirstein notes on his blog about an important development in a recent case: “Columbia College in Chicago is offering two sections of the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict course in their fall 2014 semester offerings. Instructor Iymen Chehade has been in the middle of a major academic freedom case concerning a prior reduction of sections of this…
This guest post was written by Michael DeCesare, Chair of the Department of Sociology at Merrimack College and President of the AAUP Chapter there. At a special meeting of the University of Southern Maine (USM) faculty senate on March 14th, USM President Theodora Kalikow announced her plan to eliminate four academic programs and lay off…
In the Michigan Senate, the Appropriations Higher Education Subcommittee included in its budget proposal a penalty against any public college or university that teaches a labor-related course or offers a labor-studies program. Michigan State University has been considering an agreement to adopt a portion of programming from the National Labor College. A spokesperson for the…
Guest Blogger Douglas Boyd is a Professor in the Department of Cancer Biology at the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston. The 1966 “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities” (adopted by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) (http://www.aaup.org/report/), the Association of Governing Boards of Universities (AGBU), the American Council…