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…
BY HARRY R. LEWIS Harry Lewis is Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, and former Dean of Harvard College. This essay is reposted from his blog. I used to visit Hong Kong regularly, and also made a few trips to mainland China. One of those trips put me in a provincial…
BY JENNIFER RUTH Last week on Academe Blog, John Wilson argued that one idea proposed by Princeton faculty members who wrote a July 4 letter calling for anti-racist reforms is misguided. The signatories ask Princeton administrators to “constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents,…
BY JOHN K. WILSON More than one hundred professors at Princeton have signed a letter proposing reforms in the wake of Black Lives Matter. The letter contains a lot of good ideas (which I suspect is what the signers support), but unfortunately it also has one particularly bad idea: “Constitute a committee composed entirely of…
BY RABAB IBRAHIM ABDULHADI The author was one of three 2020 recipients of the AAUP’s Georgina M. Smith award, which is given to those who have provided exceptional leadership in a given year in improving the status of academic women or in academic collective bargaining and, through that work, improved the profession in general. Because…
BY THE AAUP The AAUP issued the following statement today: As the ongoing demonstrations of the past few weeks have shown, our nation is once again being called on to reckon with systemic racism and its impact on Black, Latinx, indigenous, and other people of color. Black lives matter, and the AAUP stands in solidarity…