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…
BY HANK REICHMAN Leon Wofsy, Emeritus Professor of Immunology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, died August 25 at the age of 97. Although I have been a graduate student and instructor at Berkeley and lived most of my adult life within a mile or two…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement, “Don’t Teach, Strike! A Call to Educators Worldwide to Take Action for Climate Justice on September 20th,” was issued by nine U.S. faculty members, including AAUP Committee A member Michael Mann, and has since been endorsed by many more. To add your name to this call go to…
BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN The right has recently adopted the language of “viewpoint diversity” in their critique of allegedly liberal professors. “Diversity” sounds nice (how could one be against it?) and, coupled with “viewpoint,” has a ring of freedom about it. But this rhetoric barely masks the intent: to justify hiring conservative faculty and creating conservative…
BY JOHN K. WILSON [Updated with statement from Camille Paglia at the end, and a second update about it.] The Wall Street Journal last week published a profile of Camille Paglia, the University of the Arts professor who is basking in publicity she hasn’t seen in decades because some dumb students said she should be…
BY TOM DISCENNA AND AMY POLLARD Through no fault of the AAUP, its slogan “One Hundred Years, One Faculty” is too often belied in practice. The effect of state labor law, historical exigencies, and deeply entrenched attitudes has meant that in many places tenure-track (TT) and non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty are organized in separate unions. In…
BY MARTIN KICH This Labor Day, I would like to take the opportunity to thank again all of the members of AAUP and other unions nationwide who supported the Wright State chapter during our three-week strike in January and February of this year. Your letters of support and contributions to our strike fund made a…
BY HANK REICHMAN In The Future of Academic Freedom I devote a chapter to the baleful influence on academic freedom of colleges’ and universities’ increasing reliance on external donors, many of whom act on political motivations potentially detrimental to institutional values. Some of the possible pitfalls may be seen in how the Massachusetts Institute of…
BY HANK REICHMAN The tendency of right-wing “free speech warriors” to apply one standard to speech they agree with and vow to defend, and another less liberal standard to speech they don’t like is well-documented, even old news. In April John Wilson reported here how even as Republicans rallied behind President Trump’s phony executive order…