POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Threats to Academic Freedom from the Government Threaten American Principles MADISON, WI—Dec. 21, 2016 The American Association of University Professors UW–Madison Chapter reaffirms the critical importance of preventing government overreach that would restrict the rights of our students to a high quality education that values and encourages critical thinking. When our…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a victory for both academic freedom and science an appeals court ruled today that climate change scientist and AAUP Committee A member Michael Mann can sue two conservative writers over allegations that they defamed him. The case centers on posts written by Rand Simberg in a Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) blog…
BY AARON BARLOW According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Republican state legislators in Wisconsin “are threatening to pull any hope of more state funding unless a new course at UW-Madison called ‘The Problem of Whiteness’ is canceled.” This, from a movement that claims to want more freedom and less law. One legislator wants to go a step further, scouring “other…
BY JENNIFER H. RUTH This is a guest post by Jennifer H. Ruth, the faculty editor of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom and professor of film studies at Portland State University. Ruth issued a call for papers for the 2017 Volume 8 of the Journal in September, at the time Volume 7 was released. The topics…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted an item about Kristina Bogos, a former New York University (NYU) student now a graduate student at Georgetown University, who was denied entry to Qatar, where she sought to continue research on the conditions of migrant workers that she began as an undergraduate at NYU’s campus in…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Continental Europe In 2015, as the influx of refugees into Europe began to reach crisis proportions, Markus Kressler and Juan David Mendieta co-founded Kiron University, an institution exclusively available to refugees. The two major issues for the university’s potential students were access and funding. The issue of access was addressed by…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The United Kingdom, Part 4: Northern Ireland In October 2015, Mike Larkin contributed a feature article to the Belfast Telegraph that challenged the fundamental logic in the arguments for the corporatization of Northern Ireland’s universities: “When is a university not a university? When it is a business perhaps? The recent episodes…
BY HANK REICHMAN Regular readers of this blog will recall how last year New York University Professor Andrew Ross was stopped from boarding a flight to Abu Dhabi, where NYU has a campus and where Ross had intended to conduct research. Ross, a vocal critic of the human-rights record of the United Arab Emirates, was…
BY KELLY HAND Yesterday, the AAUP shared with members a petition inviting them to ask to have their names added to the Professor Watchlist, a website that purports to expose faculty who “advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” To counter these alarmist accusations, we will include the names of all who sign the AAUP petition–open to nonmembers also–in an…
BY AARON BARLOW Orange Coast College professor Olga Perez Stable Cox has taken a powder. For good reason. And all of us, whether we agree with her politically or not, whether we applaud her classroom actions or condemn them, should be appalled and frightened. No ifs, ands or buts… this is insane: The professor, the…