BY JOERG TIEDE Delegates to the 104th Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors voted today to remove the University of Iowa from the list of sanctioned institutions as well as to remove Stillman College from the list of censured administrations. The AAUP places academic institutions on the sanction list for serious departures…
BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN Joe Knott, a member of the Board of Governors of the UNC system, wrote in a News & Observer op-ed on May 25th that UNC-Chapel Hill’s faculty suffers from lack of “viewpoint diversity,” by which he means too few conservative professors for his liking. How does he propose to fix this alleged…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Joe Knott, one of the Republicans who dominate the University of North Carolina Board of Governors, published an op-ed on May 25 that imagines an alarming future for higher education under the headline “We need more conservative professors. Here’s how we can do that at UNC.” Knott generously declares his support for…
BY MICHAEL C. BEHRENT The case of Jay Smith, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill history professor whose course on college athletics was quashed by university administrators, has received considerable attention because it raises serious questions about academic freedom. Yet, as recent events attest, the case is also important on shared governance grounds. Specifically, it…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last month I had the privilege and honor of addressing a colloquium of faculty and advanced graduate students at the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP), Russia, which offers advanced degrees in the humanities and social sciences. My topic was “The AAUP and the Struggle for Academic Rights in the U.S.” The…
BY HANK REICHMAN In November 2017 the AAUP released a report on National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom, which decried “increasing restrictions on and threats to the global exchange of scientific research and the academic freedom of American scientists to interact with foreign colleagues,” especially those from China. Now the Trump administration…
BY JOERG TIEDE An investigative report is out today in a case that crystallizes the current right-wing assault on higher education. It involves issues that the AAUP has been working on intensively this year: faculty harassment and exaggerated controversies over free speech on campus. The case concerns Courtney Lawton, a graduate student and part-time lecturer…
BY AARON BARLOW In “From Austerity to Attacks on Scholars,” an article for Inside Higher Ed, Syracuse University professor Dana Cloud writes, “I discovered how the people attacking me were organized and trained through right-wing radio programs and websites in the language to use against intellectuals; they were set off like arrows from a bow”…
POSTED BY THE AAUP In an amicus brief filed on Friday, the AAUP emphasized the importance of faculty being able to use controversial language and ideas to challenge students in the classroom, and argued that Professor Teresa Buchanan’s academic freedom was violated when Louisiana State University dismissed her for making statements in the classroom that…
BY NADINE STROSSEN WITH JOHN K. WILSON Nadine Strossen, the former ACLU President (1991-2008) and Professor of Constitutional Law at New York Law School, is the author of a new book, HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press). She will be speaking May 5 at Politics and Prose…