The open access movement in scholarly publishing has been widely and rightly praised, but its potentially negative implications for academic freedom are too often ignored. Today an opinion piece on Inside Higher Ed by Rick Anderson, associate dean for collections and scholarly communication at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library, makes an important…
Academic Analytics, a private database contracted to measure faculty productivity at Rutgers, may undermine our tenure process, while narrowing the range of scholarship. If you belong to SASNB [School of Arts and Sciences—New Brunswick], please attend the School’s faculty meeting on Monday, 14 December from 2:00-4:00 p.m. in Voorhees 105 (College Ave.) to vote on…
Today’s New York Times has a terrific op-ed piece by Michael Mann, who directs the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University and is a member of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Mann writes about the efforts of Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space…
Sometime between October 15-18, the office of Dr. Angelina Godoy, Director of the University of Washington (UW) Center for Human Rights, was broken into and her desktop computer and a hard drive containing sensitive information about a recent lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency were stolen. Godoy reported that the hard drive contained “about 90…
Yesterday, even before the horrendous events in San Bernardino, physicians with Doctors for America, the National Physicians Alliance, Doctors Council, American Medical Women’s Association, American College of Preventive Medicine, The Committee of Interns and Residents, Physicians for the Prevention of Gun Violence, American Medical Student Association, American Academy of Pediatrics and Reps. David Price, Nita Lowey,…
The following piece was published originally on the website of the AAUP chapter at the University of Akron. Although it addresses issues at their institution, none of those issues are specific to their institution alone. ________________________ {The title of this post] was, quite literally, the take-home message from President Scarborough’s State of the University address.…
The following is taken from a media release issued today by the AAUP: The American Association of University Professors filed an amicus brief on October 26 with the Arizona Court of Appeals arguing that academic freedom to conduct research is essential to a vital university system and warrants protecting certain research records from disclosure. This case…
In a must-read article published yesterday on vox.com, David Roberts argues that “The House science committee is worse than the Benghazi committee.” “The Benghazi committee is not even the worst committee in the House,” Roberts contends. “I’d argue that the House science committee, under the chairmanship of Lamar Smith (R-TX), deserves that superlative for its…
Academic freedom is something we talk about a lot these days, what with Salaita and Dreger and Wisconsin and all. Less often talked about is the academic freedom of the new faculty majority. When contingent faculty’s academic freedom is talked about, it’s talked about as if precarity were the only obstacle to untrammeled academic autonomy,…