Today is the publication of Steven Salaita’s new book, Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom (Haymarket Books). Salaita’s book is smart, charming, funny, intense, civil, and sincere—and it’s a powerful argument for just how wrong the University of Illinois trustees were to fire him. Salaita’s book may not persuade those who supported…
April Kelly-Woessner argued last week at Heterodox Academy that “young people are less politically tolerant than their parents’ generation.” Titled, “How Marcuse made today’s students less tolerant than their parents,” Kelly-Woessner blames intolerance by young people on 1960s New Left theories of “repressive tolerance.” While she raises some important concerns about intolerance, Kelly-Woessner misses the…
One of the most disheartening events of this past summer on the Academe blog was the rise of invective in the comments that started with our posting of a guest commentary by a group of scholars with particular connections to–or interests in–India. The vituperation exhibited astonished me, and it came in the dozens and then hundreds (to…
At the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Neel Ahuja is teaching a course on the literature related to the 9-11 terrorist attacks. In response to concerns raised by both the Young Republicans group on the campus and by the Pope Center, the Faculty Council has issued a resolution unanimously affirming the academic integrity of…
Last week the AAUP and the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) issued a statement protesting remarks made by University of California Regent Richard Blum, which threatened negative political consequences for the University if it did not approve a policy on alleged anti-semitic speech acceptable to him and his wife, U.S. Senator Dianne…
Not too long ago I was on a panel about academic freedom at the University of California, Davis, with Robert Post, Dean of Yale Law School, former AAUP General Counsel and Committee A Chair, and co-author (with Matthew Finkin) of For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom. At a dinner afterwards with campus…
Former Northwestern professor Alice Dreger spoke in Evanston on Sept. 30, a month after resigning from her position in the medical school to protest censorship of the medical journal Atrium after she was guest editor of the “Bad Girls” issue. Dreger told an audience at Bookends and Beginnings bookstore that Northwestern administrators had removed the issue from…
An opinion piece, titled “Missed Opportunity; A Canceled Speaker Deserved to Be Heard at Pitt,” was recently published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette [September 26, 2015: A, 6]. After indicating that Finkelstein had been invited to participate in the university of Pittsburgh’s inaugural National Security Symposium, the op-ed writer offers this pithy summary of the very dubious…
It is time for a direct and specific disavowal of a key component of the sacred text of the AAUP: the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Most genuflect before its presence as either the Magna Carta of higher ed, the common law of the profession, the great classic document of academic freedom…
On September 17, the University of California Board of Regents discussed a proposed “Statement of Principles Against Intolerance.” The statement, which was prompted by allegations of harassment of Jewish students, had met with wide criticism from advocates of academic freedom (including a post by John Wilson on this blog) on one side and from Jewish…