BY HANK REICHMAN Stephen F. Cohen, one of the world’s leading scholars of Soviet and post-Soviet history and politics and emeritus professor at Princeton and New York Universities, died of lung cancer on Friday at the age of 81. The author of ten books and numerous scholarly articles, Cohen was also a prominent public intellectual…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS), a Canadian conservative advocacy group for academic freedom, issued a letter denouncing last week’s Scholar Strike. I believe the SAFS argument is wrong on two points, first when it claims that when universities support political activity, they are violating the academic freedom of students…
BY ERNST BENJAMIN Just as Kenneth S. Stern was completing his new book, The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate, he discovered that President Trump had signed an executive order adopting the “working definition of anti-semitism” and making it applicable to enforcement of the Civil Rights Act Title VI. Stern warns that the…
BY DON ERON The following essay was posted on Sept. 8 at the Daily Camera, the Boulder, Colorado newspaper, and is reposted with permission. Academic freedom has had a rough go of it lately at the University of Colorado Boulder. Nobody seems to like it. Chancellor Phil DiStefano finds it necessary but disagreeable, at least…
BY RACHEL IDA BUFF This post is excerpted from the introduction to volume 11 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. The entire volume will be available on September 22. The managed campus and the governed campus represent opposing visions of higher education. In practice and by definition, the managed campus is antithetical to both…
BY HANK REICHMAN Hans A. Linde, a leading legal scholar who served on the Oregon Supreme Court from 1976 to 1990 and whose writings energized efforts to turn to state constitutions and courts in defense of civil liberties, died on Monday at the age of 96. He was, in the words of Lawrence Tribe, “one…
BY HANK REICHMAN While most attention these days is focused on the presidential and congressional elections, here in California a major battle is shaping up over Proposition 22, an initiative that would repeal a law, Assembly Bill 5, requiring most so-called gig workers to be provided the rights of employees as opposed to being treated…
BY MARYBETH GASMAN An English professor at Iowa State University threatened to discipline students who submit papers opposing abortion, the Black Lives Matter movement, or same-sex marriage. In response, administrators at Iowa State University required the professor to change the syllabus and issued a statement to media outlets: The syllabus statement as written was inconsistent…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Introducing the Fall 2019 issue of Academe devoted to academic freedom around the world, I wrote that “Scholarship today is global. . . . Threats to scholarship outside the United States inevitably affect scholarship here.” The opposite is also true. Threats by the Trump administration against international scholars in the U.S.…
BY MALAKA SHWAIKH AND REBECCA RUTH GOULD February 2017 was a watershed month for the Palestine advocacy movement in the UK, although we only later came to realize its significance in our own lives. That month, amid a wave of cancellations of events critical of Israel, we were smeared in mainstream and local print and…