BY STEVE MUMME The academic freedom wars rage across the country as professors debate trigger warnings, hostile environments, bullying eradication, and multiple other sins infringing on academic speech. The discerning reader will surely have noticed that most of this discourse is located on university campuses, not community colleges. There’s a reason for that. As we at…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement was issued today. The AAUP and the AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress have never endorsed or supported a candidate for president of the United States or otherwise engaged in partisan political activity on the national level. For over one hundred years the AAUP has vigilantly defended the professional rights…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS The work of our AAUP chapters in Colorado’s community college system has been in the headlines recently and will continue to be so. It shows how the small, sparky things we do (staffing hallway membership tables, distributing our crossword puzzles, bookmarks, fliers, cookbooks, etc.) can lead to lightning bolts of change. Briefly,…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Even before the failed military coup of July 15 in Turkey, concern about academic freedom in that country was growing. On March 30, AAUP President Rudy Fichtenbaum and I issued a “Statement on Academic Freedom in Turkey,” expressing grave concern about attacks on more than 1,000 Turkish scholars. In July numerous…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Over the past few years this blog has posted a number of items related to the work of the conservative North Carolina-based John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. In March, 2015, John Wilson reported that the center had praised the decision of the University of North Carolina Board of…
BY JOHN K. WILSON I thought I was reading a campus newspaper from the 1950s when I saw this headline yesterday in the Chicago Maroon: “Communist Plans To Defy Campus Ban.” Suddenly, the University of Chicago has become the epicenter of several free speech controversies. It turns out that it’s pretty easy to write big…
BY HANK REICHMAN In previous posts to this blog I have criticized the blacklisting activities of two pro-Israel organizations, the Amcha Initiative and Canary Mission. The former group published a list of 218 faculty members in Middle East studies at U.S. colleges and universities who signed a petition calling for an academic boycott of Israel…
BY PETER N. KIRSTEIN Norman G. Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University in one of the most significant academic freedom cases of our time. It haunts many in the academic-freedom struggle, and has left an indelible wound in the Chicago area as many continue to feel the outrage of such persecution and inattention to…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN In June the AAUP’s annual membership meeting voted unanimously to place the College of St. Rose in Albany, New York, on the association’s list of administrations censured for violations of academic freedom. The censure concerns the action taken on December 11, 2015, by the administration of the college to eliminate twenty-seven…
BY HANK REICHMAN In 2015, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed SB 11, also known as the “campus carry” law, at a shooting range. The law permits the concealed carry of guns in dorms, classrooms, and buildings at state universities and community colleges, while leaving individual schools some latitude to keep parts of their properties firearm-free, extending…