Kevin Carey, writing in The New York Times last July, said this of American colleges and universities: “These organizations are not coherent academic enterprises with consistent standards of classroom excellence. When it comes to exerting influence over teaching and learning, they’re Easter eggs. They barely exist.” This is humbug. It’s an attempt to channel the…
In a guest post below, an author of the essay “Civility and Academic Freedom,” which appears in the new volume of the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom describes his involvement with the Academic Freedom Coalition of Nebraska and discusses the impetus for his essay: the Steven Salaita case.–Gwendolyn Bradley After Salaita: Keep Pushing for Academic Freedom!…
By Robert Warrior, Director of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign As the one-year anniversary of the debacle over the aborted appointment of Steven Salaita at Illinois approached, Inside Higher Education published an op-ed by former AAUP president Cary Nelson spelling out the lessons he contends we can all learn from…
This is a guest post by David Schultz, a contributor to the September-October issue of Academe and professor of political science at Hamline University. He was formerly AAUP chapter president at Trinity University in Texas and Minnesota state chair for AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Higher education’s business plan, as I argue in “The Rise and Coming Demise of the…
Dr Paul L. DeVito died suddenly and unexpectedly over the weekend of August 22-23, 2015. He had been provost at Saint Xavier University for two years. During his tenure, many witnessed a recrudescence of morale on campus, and an extraordinary commitment to academic freedom, shared governance and faculty activism. He was the greatest administrator I…
Academic freedom is something we talk about a lot these days, what with Salaita and Dreger and Wisconsin and all. Less often talked about is the academic freedom of the new faculty majority. When contingent faculty’s academic freedom is talked about, it’s talked about as if precarity were the only obstacle to untrammeled academic autonomy,…
The proposed intolerance policy at the University of California is a badly written, repressive, and fundamentally misguided policy that any true university should be embarrassed to even consider adopting. Universities are free to express collective values so long as they do not seek to punish those who disagree. But they ought to be careful in…
The following is an expanded version of a letter to the editor published last week in the Louisiana State University Daily Reveille. The author is LSU Professor of Physics and Astronomy A.R.P. (Ravi) Rau, who serves currently as President of AAUP’s Louisiana Conference and is a former president of the LSU AAUP chapter. The text…
One year ago, on September 11, 2014, Stephen Salaita was fired by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. This is not a date that has attracted any media attention on its anniversary, and seems to have gone completely unmentioned, perhaps because Salaita’s dismissal by this time was a foregone conclusion. But this is a…