POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of an online petition initiated yesterday, which, as of this writing (10 a.m. PST January 28), had already attracted nearly 3,000 signatures, including 12 Nobel laureates, John Bates Clark medalists, members of the National Academy of Sciences and at least one MacArthur Fellow. To add your…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This series covers the issues that surfaced in 2015. I had it done at the beginning of 2016, but I have been somewhat slow getting it posted. Southwest Asia, Part 2 Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar is an Indian-American who has lived in Qatar for more than a decade. Initially, she held an administrative…
BY J. MICHAEL RIFENBURG Guest blogger J. Michael Rifenburg teaches at the University of North Georgia. This is a letter he sent to the Dahlonega Nugget, the local newspaper in his community. It appeared there recently: I’ve only been a college professor for a decade, but as 2017 begins, I feel my colleagues and I are under attack…
BY MARJORIE HEINS Marjorie Heins is the author of Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge, a history of McCarthy era attacks on teachers and professors, of the Supreme Court’s initially acquiescent response, and of the Court’s eventual vindication of academic freedom in the 1967 Keyishian case. By Marjorie…
BY JOHN K. WILSON January 23, 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, perhaps the most important case defending academic freedom in the history of law (see the essay by Marjorie Heins today about the case). Five years ago, I interviewed Harry Keyishian via email for AcademeBlog…
BY HANK REICHMAN This month saw what the AAUP quickly labeled “A Concerted Attack on Academic Freedom” in Iowa and Missouri, as well as a boneheaded bill introduced in Arizona that would have banned discussions of “social justice” at the state’s public colleges and universities. But after faculty members and higher ed leaders pushed back,…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following document was prepared and released jointly by the AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). It may be accessed in .pdf format at https://www.aaup.org/news/faqs-faculty-after-2016-election Recently, the United States has experienced an unprecedented spike in hate crimes and threats, both physical and verbal, on college and university campuses. These…
BY JOERG TIEDE The recent creation of the Professor Watchlist was met by a number of responses. Among those is the open letter circulated by the AAUP, inviting faculty to stand in solidarity with their colleagues and add their names to the Professor Watchlist. As of this posting, almost 12,000 individuals have signed on. In addition to shows of…
BY HANK REICHMAN Even as legislators in Iowa and Missouri launched what the AAUP has called “A Concerted Attack on Academic Freedom” by seeking to eliminate tenure at public colleges and universities in those states, another troubling bill was introduced the same day in Arizona. Here is the relevant proposal (emphases added): Sec. 2. Title 15, chapter…