BY JOAN W. SCOTT In the annals of academic freedom, Chandler Davis (Chan, as he was known to family and friends), who died last month, was a towering figure. His principled refusal to comply (on First Amendment grounds) with a HUAC investigation of communism at the University of Michigan, led to his dismissal from the…
BY AINSLEY CARRY Founded in 1816, Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is one of the oldest Black churches in the South. Black leaders in South Carolina were nurtured in this church and advanced to national prominence. Mother Emanuel—as referred to by locals—is the heartbeat of the Black community in Charleston, SC. On June 17,…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Matthew Ehrlich’s new book, Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK, explores the history of two prominent academic freedom cases in the 1960s at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ehrlich is a professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His…
BY HANK REICHMAN “The University of California could not function without the labor of lecturers. In a given year, UC employs more than 6,000 of these educators, who are hired on short-term contracts and lack the stability of tenure. All told, they teach roughly a third of courses offered across the system. Since 2011, the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Charles G. Sellers, an historian of the early 19th-century U.S. and longtime member of the University of California at Berkeley Department of History died last week at the age of 98. As a scholar Sellers was best known for his book, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846, published in 1991, which, according…
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…