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…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement was issued today by the AAUP: Legislators in Missouri and Iowa have introduced legislation that would eliminate tenure for faculty at public institutions in these states. In Missouri, the awarding of tenure would be outlawed for all faculty hired after 2017. In Iowa, tenure would be eliminated even…
BY BETH L. LUECK This is a guest post by Beth L. Lueck, a professor of English in the department of languages and literature at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. When my younger son came home from a ten-month deployment to Afghanistan in February 2015, he discovered his mother at the center of a right-wing maelstrom…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today the Washington Post published an important op-ed piece, “If colleges keep killing academic freedom, civilization will die, too,” by José A. Cabranes, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Cabranes, a Bill Clinton appointee and highly respected jurist, previously served as General Counsel for Yale University…
BY HANK REICHMAN I’m an historian by discipline, but I didn’t attend this year’s meetings of the American Historical Association (AHA) last week in Denver. I wish I had, if only to have heard the discussion of “Historical Expertise and Political Authority,” described by Colleen Flaherty in her report on the meeting for Inside Higher…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has issued a new report, “Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics” (pdf) that is absolutely breathtaking in its call for political repression of education. The NAS Report demands, “The New Civics must be excised from every part of the American educational system, from kindergarten…