BY DON ERON Guest blogger Don Eron is a retired University of Colorado Boulder writing instructor and a member of the national AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. As higher education budgets shrink, partisanship increases, and social media magnify and distort messages, the state of academic freedom in Colorado and across the country will be…
BY LAURA MARKWARDT This weekend’s science marches on Earth Day shook the world. Scientists, parents, children, educators, and others took to the streets for powerful mobilizations including teach-ins, dancing, and, of course, marching. Michael Mann, member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and leading climate researcher at Penn State, spoke and…
BY ERNST BENJAMIN Ernst Benjamin served the AAUP as general secretary (1984-1994) and in several other roles. A former Wayne State University faculty member, he is the author of numerous articles on academic freedom and other higher education issues and has edited three books, most recently Academic Collective Bargaining (with Michael Mauer). Discussions of threats to…
BY BILL MULLEN The Modern Language Association, one of the largest academic organizations in the world, voted by a margin of 101-93 in the Delegate Assembly in January to support a resolution declaring that the organization would not boycott Israeli Universities. The resolution now goes to a vote of the general membership this week. If…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Here are some upcoming 2017 events related to the AAUP and academic freedom: The AAUP Annual Conference is being held on June 14-17 in Washington DC. Register now: April 15 at midnight EDT is the deadline for early bird rates. Note that during this year’s event, there will also be a special…
BY HANK REICHMAN A little more than a month ago, Martin Kich posted to this blog a piece on the Koch network that prompted a lively and extensive exchange in the comments section between Conor Gibson of UnKoch My Campus, John Wilson, and Phil Magness, a professor at George Mason University, frequent commenter on this…
BY AARON BARLOW Somewhere around 1970, I walked by a wall on a college campus that had been plastered with a huge poster of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. Below, someone had splashed the words “loco parentis.” That was exactly how we students felt in those days about college and university power over our lives. Then, it…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted an item on threats to academic freedom at Central European University (CEU) in Hungary and European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP). Yesterday, tens of thousands of demonstrators swarmed Budapest in defense of the CEU. The protest drew some of the largest crowds against right-wing prime minister Victor Orban’s…
BY AARON BARLOW Stella Nyanzi, a medical anthropologist who earned her PhD at the University of London and who is currently a research fellow at Makerere University’s Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) in Kampala, Uganda (though her exact status at MISR seems a little uncertain), has been arrested in Kampala for “various offenses related…
BY HANK REICHMAN On April 4, the Hungarian Parliament passed a law that could compel Central European University (CEU), founded in 1991 by the liberal financier and philanthropist George Soros, the liberal financier and philanthropist who promotes democratic, transparent government and freedom of expression through his Open Society Foundations, to cease operations in the country. The…