BY JONATHAN REES Aaron has already pointed you this morning to the very sad and strange events going on at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Maryland. I want to quote from the same IHE article that Aaron did and add some different emphasis: “As an employee of Mount St. Mary’s University, you owe a duty…
Writing for NPR, Camila Domonoski has reported the following: “A professor at an evangelical Christian college who was suspended for saying Christians and Muslims worship the same God will no longer be teaching at the school. “As we’ve reported, Larycia Hawkins, an associate professor of political science who had tenure at Wheaton College in Illinois,…
BY DAVID RANDALL David Randall, the Director of Communications at the National Association of Scholars, has written a response to John K. Wilson’s critique of Peter Wood’s “The Architecture of Intellectual Freedom.” We’ve decided to put it up as a guest post, since it’s a little long for a blog comment. It’s written in the…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, has written a detailed 11,000-word theoretical account of what academic freedom means. In response, I want to examine some of his arguments in detail, although I don’t have time and space to address every point. But fundamentally, I think Wood takes academic…
BY MARTIN KICH On January 26, AFEC-AAUP and the Visual and Media Arts department of Emerson College hosted Danny Ledonne, one of Emerson College’s most controversial graduates. Ledonne (‘04) spoke about artistic and academic freedom after a screening of his critically praised documentary film, Playing Columbine, which explores the controversy created by his video game, Super Columbine…
BY HENRY REICHMAN The national AAUP has called on the University of Missouri to lift its suspension of Melissa A. Click, the assistant professor who was videotaped attempting to remove a student journalist from the site of a campus protest. In a letter emailed yesterday to the Columbia campus’s interim chancellor, Henry C. (Hank) Foley,…
BY KELLY HAND It’s not too late to submit a paper for the AAUP’s 2016 Journal of Academic Freedom. In the slushy aftermath of the major East Coast snowstorm that caused closures and delays for the AAUP’s national office and many higher education institutions, the deadline for submissions to Volume 7 of the Journal for…
BY HANK REICHMAN If you want evidence about why academic freedom matters, then read this piece from the Washington Post about Virginia Tech Professor of Civil Engineering Marc Edwards, “The Heroic Professor Who Helped Uncover the Flint Lead Water Crisis.” Last week, bowing to intense pressure from the beleaguered people of Flint, Michigan Governor Rick…
BY HENRY REICHMAN Over the weekend Phil Matier and Andrew Ross of the San Francisco Chronicle broke a story [behind a paywall] that revealed growing concerns among UC Berkeley faculty about a previously secret decision by University of California President Janet Napolitano, former Secretary of Homeland Security, to install new computer hardware capable of monitoring computer…
BY AARON BARLOW The crisis is upon us. It has been building—the pressure on a fault line—for at least 45 years, certainly since the Powell Memo of 1971. By soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, it includes this: One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time is the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates,…