POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Like many academics, I am a devotee of crime fiction, especially of the noirish and hard-boiled varieties. On a plane trip earlier this summer I was enjoying a collection of stories, Jewish Noir, edited by Kenneth Wishnia (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), when one tale leaped out as unique. “Living Underwater,”…
BY HANK REICHMAN Librarians in the University of California system are represented by the American Federation of Teachers. They are currently engaged in bargaining a new contract. In the course of that process the UC-AFT proposed that the following underlined language be added to Article 1, Recognition, in the new contract: The University recognizes librarians…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Dixie State University (DSU) in Utah, after trying and failing to fire music professor Ken Peterson for the crime of gossip, is now declaring that Peterson, to keep his job, must sign a “Last Chance Agreement” that is one of the most extreme violations of academic freedom and free speech that…
BY JOHN K. WILSON I’m disturbed by many of the arguments against the decision by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center to hire as a senior fellow Marc Short, the former White House director of legislative affairs and senior adviser to President Donald Trump. William Hitchcock and Melvyn Leffler, history professors at Virginia, resigned from…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Today’s CBS Sunday Morning featured a segment bemoaning the loss of civility, which is apparently the great crisis of our times. It included lawyer (and law professor) Alan Dershowitz declaring, “It’s hard to have dialogue without civility.” Dershowitz has complained about being shunned in Martha’s Vineyard for his defense of Donald…
POSTED BY KELLY HAND The AAUP continues to call attention to the targeted harassment of faculty, which has followed an increasingly familiar pattern since the 2016 election. Right-wing websites such as Campus Reform and the Professor Watchlist publicize, and frequently distort, statements or social media postings by faculty members whose perspectives on racism and other topics they…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s 4-2 ruling on Friday in favor of John McAdams against Marquette University has received an enormous amount of media coverage, and it deserves it. This is a very important decision protecting the contractual right of academic freedom (and the AAUP’s definition of it), which sets a precedent…
BY AARON BARLOW My embarkation on an academic career coincided with the rise of what we now call “social media,” then known as “the blogosphere.” At that time, many involved online cloaked themselves in anonymity in the mistaken belief that they couldn’t be discovered. That made me uncomfortable: There are many legitimate reasons for masking…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled in favor of John McAdams in his case against Marquette University, with the majority writing, “We conclude that the University breached the Contract by suspending Dr. McAdams for exercising his contractually protected right of academic freedom.” The Court ordered, “we hold the University to its…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the report of the AAUP’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, presented to the AAUP annual meeting in Arlington, Virginia, on June 16 and to be published in the annual AAUP Bulletin issue of Academe later this summer. Introduction In the past year Committee A published several policy documents…