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…
The AAUP signed the below declaration of support for resistance to political attacks on academic freedom at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul from BOYUT, the community of Boğaziçi University alumni living outside of Turkey. They write:“The Erdogan government has been intervening in the institutional autonomy of Bogazici University since Jan. 1, 2021, in an attempt to…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The letter below, which has so far attracted over 700 signatures, a veritable who’s-who of Jewish and Israel Studies, comes in response to the University of Washington placing its five-year-old Israel Studies Program on hold after a major donor, angry about a professor’s criticism of Israel, took her money back. Becky…
BY HANK REICHMAN The Delhi High Court today ordered Twitter to take down within 48 hours certain tweets by Rutgers University historian Audrey Truschke, days after she and other scholars were barred by the court from publishing a letter accusing an Indian popular historian of plagiarism. On Tuesday. a large group of scholars had issued…
BY DALE E. MILLER Several states have taken or are considering measures to prohibit the teaching of “divisive concepts.” In my state, Virginia, new governor Glenn Younkin immediately issued Executive Order Number One (E.O. 1), “Ending the Use of Inherently Divisive Concepts, Including Critical Race Theory, and Restoring Excellence in K–12 Public Education in the…
BY JENNIFER RUTH AND EDDIE R. COLE When the entire Black delegation of the Mississippi State Senate walked out to protest the vote on banning critical race theory on January 21, I thought about UCLA professor Eddie R. Cole’s 2020 book The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom. “The people…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN In November, PEN America, the organization of writers that champions free expression and is the largest of the more than 100 centers worldwide that make up the PEN International network, released a report warning that “a wave of alarming legislative efforts to limit teaching and learning on topics including racism, sexism,…