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,…
BY JOHN K. WILSON I have not previously spoken out in defense of Melissa Click, the University of Missouri professor who was loudly denounced for supporting a student protest by keeping out student journalists. Like many others, I strongly opposed her actions, and despite many threats against her and calls for her dismissal, she was…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week, Robert Quinn, the executive director of Scholars at Risk, an international network of higher education institutions in 39 countries with headquarters at New York University, published an op-ed piece in the Washington Post entitled “The War on Education.” The attack last week at Pakistan’s Bacha Khan University that killed 22 and…
BY KELLY HAND In his article “Steven Salaita, the Media, and the Struggle for Academic Freedom” in the January-February 2016 issue of Academe, Peter N. Kirstein writes about media coverage of the controversy surrounding Steven Salaita’s dismissal by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The issue’s special focus on media and the faculty was inspired…
BY HENRY REICHMAN In an important piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education last week, “Watch What You Say: How Fear is Stifling Academic Freedom,” Fredrik deBoer, who teaches at Purdue University, made the essential connection between violations of academic freedom and the academic labor market. Seeking to explain “the pervasive sense of fear that…
BY HENRY REICHMAN Teresa Buchanan, the Louisiana State University (LSU) education professor terminated over strong objections from a faculty review committee and the Faculty Senate, last week filed a federal First Amendment lawsuit against the president of LSU and other top administrators for violating her free speech and due process rights by firing her last…
BY HENRY REICHMAN The Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund (IIE-SRF) awards fellowships to academics who are facing threats in their home countries. These fellowships support visiting academic appointments at institutions of higher learning outside the fellows’ home countries, where they may continue their teaching and/or research in safety. The program’s emphasis is on…