BY RUDY FICHTENBAUM Melvyn Goldfinger, who was associate professor of neuroscience, cell biology, and physiology at Wright State University, died on September 17 at the age of seventy-four. Mel Goldfinger was a champion for academic freedom, shared governance, and the economic security of the faculty–the three bedrock principles of the AAUP. It was Mel, along…
BY KEVIN MCGRUDER In 2021, the movement against the purported teaching of Critical Race Theory in K-12 schools and public colleges dominated public discussions in many communities and has now resulted in legislation against the teaching of “divisive concepts” in many states. It is a matter of public record, as Jennifer Ruth noted here, that…
BY JOHN K. WILSON In a June 9 essay for the Washington Post, Stanford professor Emily Levine attacked the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles as a “mistake” for failing to offer a “positive vision” of academic freedom. As the subhead for her essay puts it, “Linking academic freedom to tenure has led to an impoverished…
BY HENRY REICHMAN AND IRENE MULVEY The following statement was issued by Henry Reichman, chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and Irene Mulvey, AAUP president. The outgoing Trump administration’s 1776 Report, released on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, is an attack on the socially progressive and antiracist goals that King worked…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On November 2, the day before he lost re-election (in a failed attempt to lure voters with his faux patriotism), Donald Trump signed an executive order creating the 1776 Commission, which worked quickly to produce a report before Joe Biden could take office and rescind this terrible idea and the terrible…
BY GRAHAM A. PECK Graham Peck is the Wepner Distinguished Professor of Lincoln Studies in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Springfield. The following is a modified version of the Wepner Distinguished Professor Investiture Lecture, delivered Thursday, September 24, 2020. A video of the address is available here. In 2017, I…
BY THE CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY HISTORY DEPARTMENT Responding to President Donald Trump’s September 17 attack on history that is not “patriotic”, and in particular, the “1619” feature in the New York Times, the Chapman University History Department decided to go public with their reply, posting it to The Panther, the university’s student newspaper. Under the heading,…
BY JACK C. LANE Rollins College’s embrace of AAUP principles and subsequent removal from the AAUP’s list of censured institutions in 1939 brought an end to a crisis at the college that had begun in 1933 with the dismissal of Professor John Rice and eleven other faculty members, an episode discussed in my article for…
BY HANK REICHMAN Hans A. Linde, a leading legal scholar who served on the Oregon Supreme Court from 1976 to 1990 and whose writings energized efforts to turn to state constitutions and courts in defense of civil liberties, died on Monday at the age of 96. He was, in the words of Lawrence Tribe, “one…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Mary Grabar, a fellow at the right-wing Alexander Hamilton Institute, has written an essay praising Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) for introducing the Saving American History Act of 2020, “a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts.” This is…