POSTED BY THE AAUP The history of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) since its founding in 1915 has coincided with racial upheaval and transformation in the academy at large, from desegregation to current struggles for racial justice. Academe, the magazine of the AAUP, invites proposals for articles that would examine the Association’s work over…
BY CHRISTIAN K. ANDERSON AND PATRICIA SULLIVAN We are reprinting with permission this guest column published yesterday in the University of South Carolina Daily Gamecock. On April 25, 1963—60 years ago—Robert F. Kennedy spoke at a meeting of the University of South Carolina chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). He was invited by…
BY KELLY BENJAMIN Students from at least nine universities across Florida walked out of class yesterday in protest of Governor Ron DeSantis’s relentless barrage of attacks on the state’s higher education system. The walkouts, organized by the Dream Defenders and Stand for Freedom, came in response to DeSantis’s crackdown on all things “woke” in state education, including…
BY JENNIFER RUTH Nobody has a crystal ball but given the president-elect’s words and acts during the campaign—not to mention his seedy experiment in higher education—we would be fools not to expect an attack on the liberal institutions of shared governance and academic freedom. We need to look at what has happened to the sanctity of…
BY JENNIFER RUTH The rejection of the College Board’s AP course in African American Studies is only the latest in a series of disturbing news relating to education coming out of Florida. Other examples include the January 18 statement from the presidents of the twenty-eight institutions in the Florida College System declaring they will not…
BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE Years ago, I was speaking with a colleague about one of the paradoxes of university life: tenured faculty enjoy more job security than almost any other occupational group in US society, yet they are often afraid to fight for their interests as a group. My colleague accounted for this lack of collective…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In April 2019, a friend and I visited the grave of Lin Zhao in Suzhou, China to pay respect to one of history’s bravest defenders of intellectual freedom. Scanning a hill dotted with around 300 gravestones, we saw three CCTV cameras trained on one spot and climbed to it. My friend snapped…
BY DAVE NALBONE On December 10, 2022, during a morning commencement exercise, Purdue University Northwest chancellor Tom Keon, in an apparent effort to dovetail on the humor of the commencement speaker who gave examples of the made-up language he used to entertain his grandchildren, offered his “Asian version” . . . to stunningly bad effect.…
BY JENNIFER RUTH “Where woke goes to die.” Let’s call this phrase what it is: fascist propaganda. In “The Collapse of Radical Reconstruction,” the first episode of Princeton professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s podcast “History is Us,” Le Moyne College professor Douglas Egerton says, “Reconstruction did not fail. Reconstruction was killed.” What does “where woke…
BY TIMOTHY V. KAUFMAN-OSBORN For academic freedom’s advocates, there is much to like about the recent federal court ruling prohibiting Florida’s board of governors from enforcing the Individual Freedom Act. Especially gratifying are the rhetorical tropes Judge Mark Walker deploys in justifying this preliminary injunction. When the legislature adopted what Governor Ron DeSantis dubbed the…