Scrabble tiles spelling out "free speech."

Journal of Academic Freedom Explores Free Speech

BY RACHEL IDA BUFF We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 9 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. The journal features recent scholarship on academic freedom and its relation to contemporary crises of austerity, shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining. This year’s volume focuses on the intersections of academic freedom and free speech,…

Standing with Professional Ethics

BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday a group of faculty supporters of the BDS movement posted to this blog a statement, “Standing with John Cheney-Lippold,” which called on readers to support University of Michigan Professor Cheney-Lippold’s decision not to write a letter of recommendation for a student seeking to study for a semester in Israel.  They offer…

Standing with John Cheney-Lippold

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…

Trump Once Again Attacks Science

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…

CAUT Opposes Ontario’s Campus “Free Speech” Diktat

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…

Victory at Rutgers

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…

Academic Freedom Conference at Berkeley City College, September 28

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.”…