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…
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…