BY HANK REICHMAN Bandy Lee, a former Yale University faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine, filed suit in federal court March 22 against the University alleging “unlawful termination… due to her exercise of free speech about the dangers of Donald Trump’s presidency.” Lee charges that Yale fired her in…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Earlier today, Boise State University lifted its suspension on 52 classes with 1300 students for UF 200: Foundations of Ethics & Diversity. This was a necessary correction to a serious mistake the administration made last week when it announced one of the largest attacks on academic freedom in American history, with 52…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Jennifer Ruth, who is a contributing editor here at AcademeBlog as well as a professor of film studies at Portland State University (PSU) and a member of the AAUP’s Committee A, published an important op-ed this week in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and so I wanted to offer my critique…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The new Academic Freedom Alliance launched on March 8, 2021. Below is my interview via email with Keith E. Whittington, Chair of the Academic Committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and the author of Speak Freely: Why Universities Must…
BY JOHN K. WILSON This past week, Georgetown law school fired adjunct professor Sandra Sellers (and suspended her co-instructor David Batson) for an accidentally recorded conversation about racial disparities in student grades. In the video, which was recorded in February when the taping of the class continued after all the students had left the session,…
BY THE AMERICAN COUNCIL OF LEARNED SOCIETIES On Friday, March 5, 2021, Iowa lawmakers vote on legislation that would end tenure for faculty at Iowa’s three public universities. The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) issued the following letter to leaders of the Iowa House of Representatives and State Senate, as well as Governor Kim…
BY HANK REICHMAN The AAUP issued the following statement today. Three proposals currently under consideration by the Iowa Legislature raise troubling concerns about academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus. One bill would end tenure for professors at the state’s three public universities. Tenure provides that after a suitable probationary period a faculty member…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, issued a 195-page report, “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship” and published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Academic Freedom Is…
BY JOHN K. WILSON In an extraordinary attack on academic freedom, three fellows from Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution–Scott Atlas, Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson–are demanding censorship of faculty and the student newspaper in order to silence criticism of themselves. They write in an article at the Stanford Review (a conservative student publication), “as individuals we…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Today, I’ll be speaking on a PEN America panel about “Academic Freedom and Classroom Conduct” along with Jonathan Friedman, Neijma Celestine-Donnor, and Amna Khalid. So I wanted to offer a few thoughts about what academic freedom means in the classroom. Along with freedom of research and extramural utterances, freedom of teaching…