New Volume of the Journal of Academic Freedom

POSTED BY KELLY HAND We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 8 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. The journal features recent scholarship on academic freedom and its relation to shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining. Highlights from the volume include an article by Andrew Ross on academic labor and human rights at…

Why Banning Speakers Is Absolutely Wrong

BY JOHN K. WILSON Milo Yiannopoulos’ much-hyped Free Speech Week at Berkeley has disappeared, not with a bang but with a whimper. The whimper came yesterday when Milo made a brief appearance on Sproul Plaza, where he sang the Star-Spangled Banner (without kneeling) and left about 30 minutes later. Berkeley spent an estimated $800,000 on…

Why the Surreptitious Recording of Teachers Does Much More Harm than Good

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH At the beginning of September, Jonathan Zimmerman wrote an article for Salon titled “Don’t Tape Our Teachers: Why Surreptitious Recording in the Classroom Isn’t OK.” Zimmerman surveys a number of recent instances in which teachers have expressed strong political opinions that have surreptitiously been recorded by students, that have then been…

Government Decrees Dismiss 5,717 Turkish Academics

BY HANK REICHMAN According to a report on the website turkeypurge.com, 5,717 teachers at 117 universities have been dismissed from their jobs in Turkey due to government decrees issued under a state of emergency following the failed coup of July 2016.  A total of nine government decrees issued between September 2016 and August 2017 dismissed…

We Are Educators, Not Prosecutors

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following op-ed was published today in the Harvard Crimson over the bylines of Jason Beckfield, Joyce E. Chaplin, and Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and signed by 159 members of the Harvard University faculty.  We, the undersigned faculty, write to protest the University’s decisions to overturn Michelle Jones’s admission to the Ph.D.…

Is Milo’s Bubble Bursting?

BY HANK REICHMAN It seems the much-ballyhooed and monstrously misnamed “Free Speech Week,” organized by the infamous bigot-provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and scheduled to unfold September 24-27 at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), may not take place after all.  And if it does, it will be in a scaled-down version. The event was to…