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,…
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…