Statement by the University of Colorado at Boulder chapter of the AAUP The University of Colorado chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) joins our Colorado Conference and our national association in condemning the University of Colorado’s assault on the reputation and academic freedom of sociology professor Patricia Adler. University officials have publicly…
Yesterday John K. Wilson wrote about the Kansas Board of Regents new policy mandating institutional oversight of the blog posts, tweets, and other public digital communications of faculty and staff at Kansas colleges and universities. Because it is not restricted to communications made with institutional resources, this policy goes well beyond violating of academic freedom,…
By Jeremi Suri, University of Texas at Austin Universities are a public trust. Citizens give their precious dollars to these schools with the understanding that their scholars will study, educate, and innovate for the future. Academics have freedom to think, and they also have an obligation to use their research for the broader public good.
At Wright State, we have “Garcetti language” in our contract, protecting criticism of the administration as an aspect of academic freedom. We don’t abuse this right, but if our administration endorsed the sort of policy just approved by the Kansas Board of Regents for the public universities across that state, we would lambaste them on…
Yesterday, the Kansas Board of Regents adopted a new policy requiring all state universities to target social media, in retaliation for David Guth’s tweets (see my previous defense). In one mindless decision, the Kansas Regents have instantly adopted one of the worst campus speech codes ever seen in the entire country. This policy is clearly…
By Hank Reichman, First Vice-President and Chair, Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, AAUP This blog is not usually a forum for discussion of internal AAUP organizational matters, but Peter Kirstein’s thoughtful posting on the Boyle case at NEIU merits engagement by someone from AAUP’s elected leadership, as does the lengthy comment on that posting…
An AAUP report this month on the case of John Boyle (see more about it in the post by Peter Kirstein earlier today), an assistant professor of linguistics at Northeastern Illinois University, raises once more the problem of using the vague term “collegiality” in questions of the granting of tenure. The NEIU president, an AAUP…
Today, the AAUP released its report on Northeastern Illinois University dealing with the tenure case of John Boyle. Peter N. Kirstein of the Illinois AAUP comments on the process in this case. By Peter N. Kirstein, St. Xavier University One of the unresolved structural problems within the AAUP is the relationship between State Conferences’ Committee A…
What follows is the opening section of J. M. Coetzee’s Foreword to a new book by John Higgins, Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa. Coetzee is, of course, a very highly regarded South African novelist, whose honors include the Nobel Prize for Literature. Higgins is a professor at the University of Cape Town. The…
I’ve always had some ambivalent feelings about boycotts. I agree with the AAUP’s strong and principled opposition to academic boycotts, and I think engagement in almost every case is better than a boycott. On the other hand, I believe that individuals have the right to engage in boycotts, that institutions have the right to urge…