BY JENNIFER RUTH The education gag orders sweeping red states are being challenged in the courts on First Amendment grounds. This makes sense and we must hope that all such challenges prove effective. The reality, though, is that the anti-CRT and “divisive concepts” legislation directly attacks academic freedom. As AAUP President Irene Mulvey recently tweeted…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In “Adjunct and Tenured Faculty Must Unite to Resist Pandemic Opportunism on Campus”, a piece I wrote recently for Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt and Bertin M. Louis Jr.’s “Challenging the Corporate University” special series in Truthout, I argued that “it has become clear that adjuncts and tenured faculty alike will only be able to…
Note: At the end of April, the editors of the Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, penned an editorial supporting BDS and Palestinian liberation. In response,150 members of the Harvard Faculty wrote a statement criticizing the editorial. Another group of faculty penned their own response, which was published in the Harvard Crimson. This letter is…
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…