BY JOERG TIEDE Quincy Wright (1890-1970) served as the 20th president of the AAUP from 1944 to 1946. At the time of his election to the presidency, Wright had already served for almost two decades on Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and he would continue to serve on the committee for another decade.…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Earlier today, UC-Berkeley Dean Carla Hesse rescinded her Sept. 13 suspension of the DeCal course on Palestine. But the controversy over her original suspension remains a hotly contested debate. Dean Hesse writes, “I did not request or require any revisions of the content of the course,” a claim questioned by some…
The following letter from Dean Carla Hesse rescinds the suspension of the revised Palestine course at the University of California at Berkeley. BERKELEY: College of Letters & Science Office of the Deans 101 Durant Hall #2920 September 19, 2016 DEPARTMENT CHAIRS OF THE DIVISION OF SOCIAL SCIENCES DIVISIONAL COUNCIL OF THE ACADEMIC SENATE (UC…
BY EVA SWIDLER Guest blogger Eva Swidler is an environmental historian on the undergraduate liberal arts faculty at Goddard College and the Curtis Institute of Music. She also researches and writes in the fields of labor studies and political economy. Academic freedom is all the rage in newspapers these days. Are protests at speaking events on…
BY JOHN K. WILSON UPDATE: Berkeley rescinded the suspension on Sept. 19. Suspending a course in the middle of a semester is one of the most serious actions a university can take. On Sept. 13, Dean Carla Hesse of the University of California at Berkeley did exactly that to a student-taught DeCal class about Palestine.…
BY UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO FACULTY The following open letter from University of Chicago faculty appeared in the Chicago Maroon on Sept. 13. Dear Students of the Class of 2020: As you have undoubtedly noticed, you and your new institution have been in the media spotlight lately. We want to take this opportunity to voice our…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Members of “Academics for Peace” and Education and Science Workers Union (Eğitim-SEN) have been removed from their positions in public higher education institutions permanently! In January 2016, 2,218 scholars from Turkey signed a petition titled “We will not be a party to this crime,” also known as the Peace Petition. Since…
BY PETER N. KIRSTEIN One of the concerns that emerged during the ideological purge of Steven Salaita was its potential evisceration of the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Many feared that the vile assault on academic freedom and shared governance that precipitated the irreparable harm of a tenured professor’s career, would…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a widely publicized letter to incoming freshmen this week, University of Chicago (UC) Dean of Students John Ellison offered a bold defense of academic freedom and freedom of expression, which included this sentence: Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel…
BY JOHN K. WILSON It’s praiseworthy that the University of Chicago has announced to its students a “commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression.” But there is a problem: in this announcement, the University actually calls for limiting freedom of expression, and University of Chicago policies also severely limit free inquiry and student rights. According…