BY JENNIFER RUTH Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Saree Makdisi, UCLA professor and author of Palestine Inside Out and Tolerance is a Wasteland, for the documentary film The Palestine Exception. “The knowledge is out there,” Makdisi told me. “The genie is not going back in the bottle. In fact, the bottle is broken.…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH This open letter to the world from Gaza academics and university administrators was published yesterday by Al Jazeera here. On May 6, Israel’s cabinet voted to ban Al Jazeera and shut down its local offices. Among the many things American academics might do in response to help, one would be to…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH This morning, on April 27th, the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee sent the following urgent message to Interim President Jameson, Provost Jackson, and Senior Executive Vice President Carnaroli in response to last night’s message threatening to shut down the student antiwar protest on College Green: April 27, 2024 Dear President Jameson, Provost Jackson,…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY In the wake of last month’s horrific Supreme Court decision overturning affirmative action, an organization called Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR) filed a federal civil rights complaint against Harvard University, challenging their legacy admissions policy. As LCR litigation fellow Michael Kippins put it in a press release on their website: Harvard’s practice…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In “Academic Freedom: A Pilot Study of Faculty Views,” published in the collection Who’s Afraid of Academic Freedom? (2015), Jonathan R. Cole, Stephen Cole, and Christopher C. Weiss suggest that “an erosion of the norms of academic freedom and free inquiry has taken place at American universities and colleges.” They posit two…
BY NICOLE BRAUN A few weeks ago, I participated virtually in the very first Higher Ed Labor Summit: Building a Movement to Transform U.S. Higher Education. It was a fabulous, inspiring, stimulating and visionary experience. During the conference, we were put into small focus groups to explore the question of power, how to obtain power,…
BY THE CAMPUS POLICE WORKING GROUP The following is an excerpt, with source citations removed, from the recently released report On Campus Police Forces; see also the excerpt “The Growth and Development of Campus Police.” In July 2020, the AAUP appointed a Campus Police Working Group and charged its members with drafting a report on…
BY THE CAMPUS POLICE WORKING GROUP The following is an excerpt, with source citations removed, from the recently released report On Campus Police Forces. In July 2020, the AAUP appointed a Campus Police Working Group and charged its members with drafting a report on the role of police on campus, the appropriateness of higher education…