BY HANK REICHMAN Today was a big day for University of California librarians. Regular readers of this blog will be aware that the system’s librarians have been negotiating a new contract and that one of the contentious issues was academic freedom, which UC negotiators initially claimed did not apply to librarians. (For previous coverage see…
BY HANK REICHMAN You may recall the case of Courtney Lawton, a part-time lecturer and doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who in August 2017 received threats after a video recording of her participation in a demonstration protesting an on-campus recruitment table for Turning Point USA was disseminated on the internet. The university suspended…
BY SHANNON DEA Shannon Dea is associate professor of philosophy and vice-president of the faculty association at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The following is re-posted with permission from University Affairs/Affaires Universitaires (universityaffairs.ca). Last month I had the privilege and honor of participating in and speaking at the triennial Harry Crowe Conference, sponsored by…
BY RACHEL IDA BUFF Politically progressive faculty at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY, have begun organizing more actively at their workplace. Most recently, a number of them have come together to run a slate in the upcoming campus union chapter elections, setting forth a vision of building a vibrant chapter grounded in rank-and-file activism. As these…
BY HANK REICHMAN Princeton University graduate student Xiyue Wang, arrested by Iranian authorities for alleged espionage, has now been in prison for over 900 days (see previous posts on this case here and here). February 20 will be a “day of action” in support of the imprisoned scholar, which will include a “call-a-thon” and rally…
BY HANK REICHMAN In December I posted “Another Assault on Scholarship in Hungary,” reporting that László Lovász, President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences had informed an emergency assembly of the Academy about a move by the government to drastically cut the institution’s funding. As I reported, “Innovation Minister László Palkovics had explained why he…
BY KEITH E. WHITTINGTON Is it possible to go a month without a controversy about the extramural speech of a faculty member? Probably not. There are, after all, a lot of faculty out there, and they have greater unmediated access than ever before to put their views about matters both great and small before a…
BY NICHOLAS FLEISHER According to an AAUP investigative report released today, the most plausible explanation for the dismissal of a faculty member from Nunez Community College was that it occurred as a retaliatory measure, violating his academic freedom. Professor Richard Schmitt, a nontenured associate professor of English with twenty-two years of service at the institution,…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Earlier today, a Turkish court sentenced an academic, Yonca Demir from Bilgi University, to three years in prison for the crime of signing a peace petition critical of the government. It marked the longest sentence yet given to the 1128 professors who signed a 2016 petition by Academics for Peace that angered…