BY EVA CHERNIAVSKY AND AMIT R. BAISHYA We write as former members of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and its Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities (CAFPRR). Both of us resigned from CAFPRR after the refusal of the MLA Executive Council to advance Resolution 2025-1 to the organization’s delegate assembly. Responding to…
BY JOHN K. WILSON I fully agree with the first line of Tom Ginsburg’s attack in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the AAUP: “Colleges are entering what is likely to be their greatest crisis since the McCarthy period.” Although I don’t work for or speak for the AAUP, I strongly disagree with the rest…
BY DANIEL A. SEGAL Recent actions by Harvard University’s administration merit the Association’s timely consideration and—absent a satisfactory response from Harvard—adoption of a censure of the university’s administration. Issuing this censure will require, however, that the Association adapt and expand its censure practices. Whereas the AAUP’s existing practices are limited to responding to harm to…
BY HANK REICHMAN The recently published Winter issue of Academe, devoted to the theme of “higher education in wartime,” which I guest-edited, includes three articles by Ukrainian scholars. Odesa historian and philosopher Oksana Dovgopolova writes movingly about the impact of the war on her institution. “War creates immense challenges for higher education—there is no way around…
BY MARJORIE HEINS Harvard University’s announcement last month that it has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism was a sufficiently serious blow to academic freedom at that hallowed institution that it motivated me, as a graduate of Harvard Law School, to submit a letter to Harvard, the alumni magazine. As Hank Reichman’s “Anticipatory…
BY NATHANIEL MILLS It has now been almost a year since then-President Jeff Ettinger of the University of Minnesota intervened to revoke the properly vetted job offer to Raz Segal to serve as faculty director of UMN’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. This decision was denounced by the UMN chapter and national leadership of…
BY HISTORIANS FOR PEACE AND DEMOCRACY This statement was issued by the steering committee of Historians for Peace and Democracy on January 31, 2025, and sent to its membership. “Who controls the present controls the past,” wrote George Orwell in 1949. Authoritarian regimes have long tried to rewrite history to advance their political objectives. The…
BY JENNIFER RUTH When Jan Haaken and I decided to make The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests?, we couldn’t know how events here—much less in Gaza and the West Bank—would unfold. We had been talking about a film about the suppression of academic freedom in Texas and pivoted when some of the…
BY VERONICA VALENCIA GONZALEZ For decades, universities have served as bastions of knowledge, advancing research and shaping the intellectual foundation of society. Yet, in their pursuit of cost-cutting measures, these same institutions have systematically devalued the very people responsible for that progress: the faculty. The suppression of wages for professors; the erosion of tenure; the…
BY THE NORTH CAROLINA CONFERENCE OF THE AAUP On February 5, the University of North Carolina System issued a memorandum to UNC chancellors announcing that “all general education requirements and major-specific requirements mandating completion of course credits related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or any other topic identified in Section VII of the [UNC System]…