POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Recent years have seen extensive cuts in foreign language education at US colleges and universities. Between 2013 and 2016 alone some 651 foreign language programs were eliminated. Often these cuts are part of broader assaults on the humanities and liberal education more generally. In 2018 the AAUP and the Association of…
BY CHRISTOPHER S. ROSE Christopher S. Rose is a postdoctoral fellow with the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His 2019 dissertation, “On the Home Front: Food, Medicine, and Disease in World War I Egypt,” examines the impact of the war on the Egyptian civilian population. The following, which began…
BY LORI LATRICE MARTIN, BIKO MANDELA GRAY, AND STEPHEN C. FINLEY “Was it really necessary to copy all those folks on that last email, or do you only feel the need to do so when the recipient is a black professor, or a black student, or when the subject matter is pertaining to a unit,…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Colleges are increasingly looking at antibullying policies to respond to abusive treatment on campus. In my article in the latest volume of the Journal of Academic Freedom, “The Danger of Campus Bans on Bullying,” I argue that universities must be wary of such rules. My argument is not that bullying on campus…
BY JOHN F. COVALESKIE In “Speech, Academic Freedom, and Privilege,” in the current issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom, I argue that “colleges and universities should actively place themselves on the side of victims of systems of oppression.” Over the last couple of generations, a movement has developed to make college campuses more welcoming…
BY JUDY ROHRER It feels like every week there is a new case of an instructor being fired, released, or not renewed because of some (usually progressive) political statement or action. The increasing number of us in untenured and contingent positions find ourselves self-censoring in meetings, stressing over student evaluations, second-guessing our political activism, habitually…
BY RACHEL IDA BUFF We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 10 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. The journal features recent scholarship on academic freedom and its relation to contemporary crises of austerity, shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining. This year’s contributors draw connections between the multiple frequencies of bullying present on…
BY JOHN K. WILSON In the vast pantheon of loathsome lackeys serving Donald Trump, Sean Spicer is still a star figure. His obsequious devotion to Trump and indifference to the truth reached legendary status. This week, Spicer begins his $125,000 stint on “Dancing With the Stars” where everyone expects his stumbling on the dance floor…
BY AARON BARLOW “She may have, and would have been right.” This cavalier dismissal points directly to the corruption at the heart of contemporary academia. It’s a response from MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte to an inquiry from New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo concerning a warning from scholar and entrepreneur Sarah Szalavitz about…
BY KATHERINE FRANKE AND MICHAEL ALTMAN-LUPU We have a message for Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar: welcome to the blacklist. You have joined a growing group of human rights defenders who have been denied entry to Israel and Palestine by the Israeli government because we dared to argue that Israel should comply with international…