BY Richard Falk, Cynthia Franklin, Terri Ginsberg, Salah Hassan, David Klein, Adam Miyashiro, Bill V. Mullen, David Palumbo-Liu, Andrew Ross, and Snehal Shingavi John Cheney-Lippold, an associate professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor, has been criticized by some supporters of the State of Israel for declining to write a letter of recommendation…
BY HANK REICHMAN The Trump administration’s disregard for and assault on science have been well documented by the AAUP, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and others. Now President Trump himself and his FEMA administrator, Brock Long, have attacked the credibility of a study by George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, which found…
BY JOAN W. SCOTT Threats to academic freedom abound the world over and it is dismaying to confront one crisis situation after another. The latest news comes from Birzeit University, in the West Bank. Professors there, and at other Palestinian universities in the Occupied Territories, who hold foreign passports have been prevented by the Israeli…
BY HANK REICHMAN Ontario Conservative Premier Doug Ford has warned the province’s public universities and colleges they will face funding cuts if they fail to adopt free-speech policies that defend controversial speakers on campus. The government announced yesterday that it will give schools four months to design, implement and enforce wide-ranging free-speech policies. Ford had promised…
BY HANK REICHMAN On Tuesday of this week the national AAUP delivered a letter to the leaders of the Rutgers University AAUP-AFT chapter expressing concern that any discipline stemming from a report by that university’s Office of Employment Equity, which concluded that history professor James Livingston’s Facebook posts on gentrification “were not protected by the…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On Friday, September 28 the AAUP Foundation and the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges Education Institute (FACCC EI) are sponsoring a day-long conference on academic freedom at Berkeley City College in downtown Berkeley, California. UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky will deliver the keynote address on “Free Speech on Campus.”…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a letter sent by AAUP Associate Secretary Hans-Joerg Tiede to professors Deepa Kumar and David Hughes, President and Vice-President of the Rutgers University AAUP-AFT. The letter is followed by a statement issued by the AAUP-AFT Rutgers Executive Council. For additional background on this case see…
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The following is reposted with permission from the Remaking the University blog. Michael Meranze is Professor of History at UCLA and a member of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. For previous posts on this topic go here and here. As part of their negotiations with the university, University of…
BY HANK REICHMAN Non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements are much in the news these days. Most notably, the “aggressive and unconventional” use of such agreements by the Trump White House has attracted attention because, as the Washington Post pointed out, “most legal experts believe such agreements are not legally enforceable for public employees.” In this context…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week I posted an item about how contract negotiators for the University of California have refused to acknowledge the faculty status and academic freedom of the system’s librarians. Yesterday, the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) and the California Conference of the AAUP (CA-AAUP) issued the following…