BY SHU WAN In the past few years, the Chinese government’s consistent interventions with—and suppression of—electronic resources in academic libraries in the nation have become an internationally controversial issue. One example of such censorship was a 2017 incident involving the China Quarterly. A statement by the journal’s publisher, Cambridge University Press, noted that “all international…
BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE University of Florida administrators have created a slideshow to help faculty understand the implications of the state’s new law, House Bill 7, also known as the Stop WOKE Act. One slide says, “At its core, the bill’s message is: ‘No one likes to be told what to think. And that includes students.’…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On May 23, the Princeton Board of Trustees voted to fire tenured professor Joshua Katz on the recommendation of a dean and the president, and with the approval of a faculty committee. Katz’s defenders claim that he is being persecuted for his extramural utterances calling a black student group a “terrorist…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On March 16, 2021, Boise State University ordered the suspension of fifty-five classes enrolling more than 1,299 students in its required course, UF 200: Foundations of Ethics & Diversity. The mass suspension lasted for eight days, and it is one of the largest targeted suspensions of a course in the history…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In “Academic Freedom: A Pilot Study of Faculty Views,” published in the collection Who’s Afraid of Academic Freedom? (2015), Jonathan R. Cole, Stephen Cole, and Christopher C. Weiss suggest that “an erosion of the norms of academic freedom and free inquiry has taken place at American universities and colleges.” They posit two…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom, Michael Bérubé and I argue that academic freedom is not free speech (thus, the title) and that it operates with a different set of rules and expectations. We further argue that those rules need firming up: When universities respected…
BY DANIEL A. SEGAL At Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University this semester, the university administration censored a campus event featuring Professor Rabab Abdulhadi of San Francisco State University (Abdulhadi is also a past recipient of the AAUP’s Georgina Smith Award). Organized by a student group—Cardozo on Israel and Palestine (CIP)—the event had been…
BY DAVID PALUMBO-LIU In the past several years, Linfield University in Oregon has gained a reputation for creating a hostile work environment. One reason is that it has displayed a willingness to harass and even fire tenured faculty who are willing to point out its failures in key areas like sexual harassment, faculty governance, and…
BY TWO TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY LIBRARIANS The news has been inundated with reports of relentless attacks on intellectual freedom and attacks on libraries. Just last week a blog detailed the many ways in which books and information are being challenged in schools and in public service sectors. Less well-reported, however, is the ongoing attack on…
BY JENNIFER RUTH When I was a junior faculty member, one of my senior colleagues invited me to a regular happy hour he attended with Portland State’s top administrators. The man who was the provost at the time was there, as well as a head HR person, a legal affairs person, the director of facilities,…