BY AAUP STAFF In her January–February 2015 Academe article, “Investigative Procedures in Academic Freedom and Tenure Cases,” Debra Nails describes the AAUP’s procedures for academic freedom and tenure investigations, in which dedicated member-volunteers work closely with staff to produce widely respected reports that treat serious violations of the AAUP’s principles and standards. Using her own…
BY ERNST BENJAMIN This is a guest post by Ernst Benjamin, a contributor to the January-February issue of Academe. Benjamin served as AAUP general secretary from 1984 to 1994 and 2006 to 2008. He also has served as AAUP director of research, chair of the AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress, and president of the Wayne State University AAUP chapter. He is coeditor of Academic Collective Bargaining.…
BY AAUP STAFF The AAUP has reached its centennial year—a major achievement in the life cycle of a professional organization. The newest issue of Academe, now posted online, looks back at the Association’s work over the past century. Titled “AAUP: The First Hundred Years,” the issue examines the AAUP’s work in the courts, in carrying…
Christmas Day, 1921, the prison gates opened and Eugene Victor Debs was free at last! Warren Gamaliel Harding, one of America’s most underrated presidents, displayed rare political courage in commuting Debs’s sentence to time served. He was liberated as a persecuted political prisoner from the American gulag that included the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. His “crime” was opposing the draft during The Great War…
This year, 2014, is the centennial of the outbreak of war in Europe which quickly escalated into the senseless slaughter of World War I. Charles Schenck, a secretary of the Socialist Party, opposed the draft during The Great War, a term that many used to describe World War I. He wrote an enduring, magnificent pamphlet that is…
Hank Reichman, the First Vice-President of AAUP and a frequent contributor to this blog, is marking his retirement by teaching a seminar on the history of academic freedom in the American university. Unprompted, his provost handed him a sizable check and invited him to organize a broader symposium, a speakers series, on the history of…
Among the articles in this year’s edition of the Journal of Academic Freedom is one I wrote on the history of the founding of the AAUP. Since I am not a professional historian (I teach computer science), I feel like I should offer an explanation (and to my colleagues who are historians, an apology) for…
Most of the debate about why the firing of Steven Salaita by the University of Illinois was wrong has centered on three areas: contract law (he already had an effective contract), Constitutional law (he was punished for his political views by a government entity), and the principles of academic freedom (he was punished for his…
Writing for the New York Times (June 24, 2014), in a column titled “The Reality of Student Debt Is Different than the Cliches,” David Leonhardt reviews a recent study released by the Brookings Institute. These are the main assertions: (1) Student debt, on average, has actually not increased significantly. (2) Because the earnings of college…