BY ROSS JACKSON As the 2024 presidential election approaches, the importance of academic freedom in higher education and its broader societal implications are a primary point of focus and debate. Academic freedom, defined as the principle that scholars can engage in teaching and research without fear of censorship or retribution, is a cornerstone of democratic…
POSTED BY THE AAUP We are pleased to announce the publication of volume 15 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. Our call for papers, “Truth-Telling versus Propaganda—Exposing the Rift,” invited scholarly articles building on the themes of the previous two volumes to advance understandings of the salience of academic freedom not only to higher…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN As I have previously posted on this blog, Russian sociologist and professor Boris Kagarlitsky is serving a 5-year sentence in a Russian penal colony on the fabricated charge of “justifying terrorism.” Kagarlitsky, whose dissident activity dates back to an earlier imprisonment under the Soviet regime of Leonid Brezhnev, has become a…
BY KARMA R. CHÁVEZ AND LAUREN GUTTERMAN This post is part of a blog series, organized by Annelise Orleck, that will focus on recent crackdowns on protests at US college and university campuses against Israel’s war on Gaza. You can read the first post and an introduction to the series here. Like many campuses during…
BY ALAN SINGER In times of crisis, academics must be public intellectuals. Why invest our lives in becoming experts in history, society, policy, science, or any other field of study and then remain isolated in an academic cocoon for safety or career advancement? The consequences of silence for our profession and our society are too…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday, September 19, the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) complaint charging the university with violations of legally protected faculty employee expression surrounding the war in Gaza. I posted a summary of the complaint to this blog yesterday. To access the full 581-page (including…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today, as the UC Regents were completing their meeting at the UCLA campus, the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), a partner of the AAUP, and the faculty associations at UC Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Santa Cruz filed an amended unfair labor practice (ULP) complaint against…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY A first-of-its-kind survey of higher education faculty across the South has revealed that an overwhelming majority of respondents in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas are deeply dissatisfied with the current state of higher education. The survey, which received responses from nearly 3,000…
BY EVE DARIAN-SMITH Something is broken in our college and university systems. Professors are being declared “the enemy of the people” by J. D. Vance and other MAGA Republicans. Book bans, curriculum reviews, attacks on DEI programs, threats of defunding, and suspending faculty or removing their tenure are becoming widespread. Students engaged in peaceful assembly…
BY JENNIFER RUTH Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Saree Makdisi, UCLA professor and author of Palestine Inside Out and Tolerance is a Wasteland, for the documentary film The Palestine Exception. “The knowledge is out there,” Makdisi told me. “The genie is not going back in the bottle. In fact, the bottle is broken.…