Three election booths with American flags and the word VOTE in blue letters on their sides are arranged a few feet apart against the exterior brick wall of a building.

An Election about the Right to Learn History

BY BENJAMIN N. LAWRANCE This past election cycle many, if not most, eyes were on Ohio. Would it be the seventh state in a row to recognize a woman’s bodily integrity as a constitutional right? In the excitement (or disappointment) last Tuesday, however, the ongoing national struggle over history education received short shrift. Buried in…

View from window on the University of Iowa campus at sunset shows messages in blue and pink chalk before the steps of a building with an Iowa flag.

Historians Must Affirm the Right to Learn

BY CORY JAMES YOUNG I was having a conversation with a graduate student in my department about a possible collaboration when we noticed the television. One of our colleagues was on the Iowa City news providing historical context about the ongoing crisis in Palestine and Israel. Then, even more unexpectedly, a student from my previous…

Cardboard protest sign with "Amplify your voice" and a black arrow pointing down written on it

Doing the Work Only We Can Do

BY MATTHEW BOEDY I was asked by our state’s largest newspaper here in Georgia to write a column offering some priorities for higher education as lawmakers return in January for our annual legislative session. You can likely guess my priorities. Bigger budgets, better salary, and stopping culture war attacks on higher education.  But those priorities…

Maybe Book-Banning Isn’t So Popular After All

BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday’s election results in Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and elsewhere have boosted the spirits of Democrats and progressives.  One of the less widely publicized results, however, has been the stunning rebuke suffered by book-banners and transphobes like Moms for Liberty in school board elections in Iowa and elsewhere.  In the past, Iowa school…

Cardboard protest sign with "Amplify your voice" and a black arrow pointing down written on it

The Israel-Palestine War and Academic Freedom

BY ELLEN SCHRECKER As the tragic conflict unfolds in Israel and Gaza, the AAUP may now face attempts to fire pro-Palestinian professors that could make earlier academic purges look like a tea party. I know whereof I speak. I have studied academic freedom and higher education for over forty years and traced the AAUP’s failure…

A world map with a magnifying glass over the United States

It Can Happen Here?

BY JOHN AUBREY DOUGLASS There is much to worry about as we approach 2024: attacks on academic freedom, on free speech, on open societies, and attempts to degrade democracy, and not just here in the United States. As I discuss in my article “Here and Abroad, Universities Face an Autocratic Playbook” in the recent issue…

Cropped cover of the fall 2023 issue of Academe magazine, "Confronting Legislative Attacks on Higher Education"

Editor’s Note: Confronting Legislative Attacks on Higher Education

BY MICHAEL FERGUSON Following is the editor’s introduction to the fall 2023 issue of Academe, out this week. The full table of contents for the issue is available at https://www.aaup.org/issue/fall-2023-confronting-legislative-attacks-higher-education. Students returning to New College of Florida this fall found a campus in the midst of stark transformation. More than a third of the faculty…