BY JENNIFER RUTH Yesterday, the AAUP announced the release of Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System. The fifty-three page report represents almost a year’s worth of work by dedicated staff and volunteer leaders and incisively lays out the ramifications of political interference for the survival of basic AAUP principles of…
BY JOHN K. WILSON It’s always distressing during contentious times when neutral statements for free speech are twisted beyond recognition with false smears of bias and bigotry. In a November 27 essay in The Hill, Northwestern law professor Steven Lubet denounced the American Association of University Professors for a November 15 statement, “Polarizing Times Demand…
BY KEVIN HOWLEY In recent weeks, college students across the country have raised their voices in support of the Palestinian people, whose collective punishment at the hands of the Israeli government and their enablers in the United States and across Western Europe is both shameful and horrific. For conservative culture warriors, pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college…
BY RUBÉN MARTINEZ Crises in intellectual and religious thought have been opportunities for the reformulation of the basic principles and ideas of existing bodies of knowledge for decades. In the 1920s and 1930s, legal realism raised the specter of the destructive character of accepted theories of law. In the 1960s, Vatican II, the twenty-first Roman…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Last Friday, the administration of Indiana University decided to delay seeking trustee approval of a plan announced just two weeks earlier to move its Kinsey Institute to a separate nonprofit organization. The plan, made in response to legislators requiring a ban on all state funds to the Kinsey Institute because of…
BY DANIEL A. SEGAL The assault on academic freedom and campus-speech rights for pro-Palestinian students and faculty has been so fast and furious in the wake of October 7 that one hardly knows where to begin. Indeed, even to write that simple—even obvious—sentence feels risky: a voice in my head asks, Can I write that…
POSTED BY THE AAUP We are pleased to announce the publication of volume 14 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. Our call for papers, “Landscapes of Power and Academic Freedom,” invited scholarly articles investigating the links between social power and the historical development and contemporary status of academic freedom. Seeking submissions that would build on…
BY JENNIFER RUTH The situation in the Middle East demands the best of all of us. Yet so many capitalize on the moment to harness the conflict to their own domestic “culture wars” agenda. Typical are op-eds like this one, arguing that contextualization, when in support of Palestinian refugees, amounts to little more than illiberal…
BY ELLEN SCHRECKER As the tragic conflict unfolds in Israel and Gaza, the AAUP may now face attempts to fire pro-Palestinian professors that could make earlier academic purges look like a tea party. I know whereof I speak. I have studied academic freedom and higher education for over forty years and traced the AAUP’s failure…
BY THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA CHAPTER, AAUP The following statement was issued on October 28, 2023. Over the past few weeks, the Executive Committee of the University of Pennsylvania chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP-Penn) has heard from scores of colleagues who, like us, are gravely concerned about violations of…