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,…
BY MARTHA MCCAUGHEY At its February 25 meeting, the Wyoming Senate passed a budget amendment to end funding for the University of Wyoming’s Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) program and the activities associated with GWS. The Senate approved the amendment, 16–14, but it did not make it onto the House floor for consideration. The provision’s…
BY REBECCA T. ALPERT The following remarks were delivered as part of an online forum on “The Assault on Academic Freedom” sponsored by Temple University April 7. I want to focus today on my own experience of academic freedom in two very different (but related) locations: in and also beyond the classroom. Academic freedom in…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN In the ongoing discussions over the relationship between free speech and academic freedom and debates over the rights of outside speakers versus those of student protesters, an article published yesterday in Times Higher Education makes some excellent points. The author, George Letsas, a philosophy professor at University College London, writes in…
BY JOHN K. WILSON This week, the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA) wrote a letter to the president of Princeton, asking him to censor a campus website in order to protect a conservative professor’s hurt feelings. This letter is not a defense of academic freedom; it’s an attack on academic freedom. And the AFA is not…
BY MARIAH QUINN AAUP Presents is back with three new episodes, including episodes on academic freedom in Florida and student debt’s effects on faculty. In our first new episode of 2022, we talk to AAUP government relations specialist Kaitlyn Vitez and Jessica Sponsler, art historian, adjunct professor, and AAUP’s Pennsylvania state conference president, about student…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following joint statement was issued March 9 in English, Ukrainian, and Russian: As international professional associations that foster the study of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian peoples and cultures, ASEEES, BASEES, and AATSEEL* are committed to promoting international communication among scholars of all countries and identities across the humanities and social…
BY DANA SAJDI Part of my choosing to be a premodern historian is precisely to escape the reality of having been born and raised until adolescence in Nablus, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. As a schoolgirl, it was a daily routine for me to carry in my lunch tiffin an onion, the root vegetable considered…