BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the company that owns and publishes the Arkansas Times filed suit in federal court challenging the constitutionality of a state law requiring government contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel or reduce their fees by at least 20 percent. The Times initiated the suit after the University of Arkansas-Pulaski Technical College,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Two faculty members dismissed from their positions in apparent violation of their academic freedom have won restitution. A professor in Kentucky, who had criticized the governor’s Medicaid plan, won a substantial financial settlement and a return to his university, while a California community college professor fired for challenging student beliefs about sexuality…
BY HANK REICHMAN On September 6, 2018, the student newspaper at the University of North Alabama (UNA), The Flor-Ala, reported that the school’s administration had improperly withheld public documents about the resignation of the vice president of student affairs. A week later, the student journalists, members of the communications department, and The Flor-Ala media adviser…
BY LISA MINNICK On the sixth anniversary of anti-union “right to work” legislation being signed into law in Michigan, we share this letter to Western Michigan University faculty from WMU-AAUP president Lisa Minnick, who is stepping down after serving in the role since 2013. The letter originally appeared on the chapter’s website, where there is…
BY HANK REICHMAN A little more than a year ago the AAUP released a report, “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom,” prepared by a subcommittee of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The report documented “the Trump administration’s alarming hostility to science” in international scientific exchange and the field of climate…
BY HANK REICHMAN On December 1, Central European University (CEU) announced that, after a lengthy struggle, it would abandon its Budapest campus and relocate to Vienna. “Basically this is a dark day for freedom in Hungary,” said Michael Ignatieff, the president and rector of CEU. “And it’s a dark day for academic freedom.” CEU said…
BY GWENDOLYN BRADLEY Save the date for the AAUP 2019 Annual Conference on the State of Higher Education: June 12-16, 2019! Conference highlights include a plenary session on the state of academic freedom, Friday night reception, and an awards and recognition luncheon. In lieu of paper panels this year, we will organize peer-to-peer sessions in which…
BY JULIE SCHMID As we approach the end of the semester, I wanted to share information about some significant wins for the profession and for higher education as a common good that the AAUP has celebrated in recent months. These successes emphasize the power that the national AAUP, the state conferences, and the chapters have…
BY MARTIN KICH As Big Data begins to define our obsessive discussion of politics and our universities respond to the demand for specialists by developing graduate programs in the discipline, it is easy to feel as if we are swimming or, rather, drowning in data—that there is so much data that instead of providing clarity,…
BY KARL ULRICH AND SHANE BORROWMAN The faculty senate of the University of Montana Western (UMW) has regained its right to conduct its periodic review of academic administrators, with the major assistance from the AAUP. Previously, UMW faculty senate abruptly had this long-standing right and responsibility stripped from it, as had other campuses of the…