BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), a Washington-based private college presidents association serving more than 700 colleges, universities, and organizations, recently released an important report on what private college presidents are thinking. Chris Quintana described its implications in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “What’s on the Mind of the Private-College President?…
BY AARON BARLOW Yesterday, I posted an expanded version of “Stop Disparaging Professors. They Work for a Better America” on medium.com. I added, in particular, mentions of a number of professors in the public sphere, including Christine Blasey Ford. I wrote: This unfortunate blindness to the reality of…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The National Association of Scholars today issued its 11th annual “Beach Books” report critiquing common reading programs. The NAS press release is shockingly titled, “Study Finds College Common Reading Programs Indoctrinate Students.” And it declares, “American colleges and universities run common reading programs designed to indoctrinate students with progressive propaganda….” Exactly how…
BY HARRY HELLENBRAND [Ed. note: Harry Hellenbrand was provost and interim president at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). A little more than a year ago the Chancellor of the California State University system (CSU) issued two executive orders governing general education and remediation. The directives, prepared and released without appropriate faculty input, were immediately controversial,…
BY LEAH P. HOLLIS My Journal of Academic Freedom article “The Ironic Interplay of Free Speech and Silencing discusses academic freedom in the context of workplace bullying. In it, I consider the need to balance free speech rights with an individual’s right to a psychologically safe workplace. During my campus visits and talks about workplace…
BY HANK REICHMAN On Friday, September 28, about 100 California community college faculty members gathered at Berkeley City College for a day-long conference on academic freedom co-sponsored by the Faculty Association of the California Community Colleges Educational Institute (FACCC-EI) and the AAUP Foundation. The conference highlighted the growing importance of academic freedom in community colleges…
BY JAIME WEIDA I have a confession to make: along with being an English professor, I am a huge science fiction nerd. While I spend my time online reading articles and news from the websites for the MLA, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the American Federation of Teachers, and—of course—the AAUP, I also spend an…
BY BIKO MANDELA GRAY, LORI LATRICE MARTIN, AND STEPHEN C. FINLEY “Hello?” The number on the caller ID is an unfamiliar one, but you know the area code; recently, you gave a job talk in that area or submitted your tenure or promotion portfolio. And so, you hope that this is the phone call—that phone…
BY RACHEL IDA BUFF We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 9 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 volume focuses on the intersections of academic freedom and free speech,…
BY AARON BARLOW Maybe it was just too perfect a topic for my classes today. Certainly, though, I couldn’t resist. It had everything. It had: Topicality that would keep students interested; Relationship to our university system (City University of New York); Room for discussion of student value, something particularly important for first-year college students; Relevance,…