BY MATTHEW BOEDY With organizational help from Washington Post humor columnist Alexandria Petri’s recent piece on presidential endorsements . . . The Washington Post, among other major newspapers, is not endorsing presidential candidates this year. And major universities are stepping back from issuing statements on matters of public concern. Since the latter institutions are choosing…
BY ROSS JACKSON As the 2024 presidential election approaches, the importance of academic freedom in higher education and its broader societal implications are a primary point of focus and debate. Academic freedom, defined as the principle that scholars can engage in teaching and research without fear of censorship or retribution, is a cornerstone of democratic…
POSTED BY THE AAUP We are pleased to announce the publication of volume 15 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. Our call for papers, “Truth-Telling versus Propaganda—Exposing the Rift,” invited scholarly articles building on the themes of the previous two volumes to advance understandings of the salience of academic freedom not only to higher…
BY THERESA A. KULBAGA Standing in solidarity with colleagues for better wages and working conditions is what being a union means. It’s no surprise, then, that management’s first union-busting tactic is always to attempt to divide workers and turn us against each other. At Miami University, we voted overwhelmingly to unionize faculty and librarians in…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On October 26, the Executive Committee of the University of Pennsylvania AAUP chapter issued the following public statement regarding the recent police raid on Penn undergraduate students: We are alarmed by the Penn administration’s escalating use of police action against Penn students. So too are we alarmed by the University’s pattern—established…
BY ASHA NADKARNI AND LAURA BRIGGS This post is part of a blog series, organized by Annelise Orleck, that will focus on recent crackdowns on protests at US college and university campuses against Israel’s war on Gaza. You can read the first post and an introduction to the series here. Like many campuses, the University…
BY MALICK W. GHACHEM In the weeks since writing my recent piece for Academe magazine on last year’s Israel-Palestine campus conflict, the atmosphere on my own campus (MIT) has become, if anything, even more tense. The pressures bearing down on both administrators and students remain all too apparent, as does the war of attrition about…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The temptation to regulate free speech in the name of a higher good is a constant danger on the left, and the right. Too often, we ignore how centrist administrators and thinkers endorse censorship too easily, and how much power they hold. I think the greatest threats to campus free speech…
BY TABBYE CHAVOUS Ed. note: This week the New York Times Magazine published an article, “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?,” by investigative reporter Nicholas Confessore. To many in the U-M community, including some with serious criticisms of some DEI initiatives, the article was plagued by misinformation and bias. The…
BY MICHAEL FERGUSON Following is the editor’s introduction to the fall 2024 issue of Academe, “The Status of Academic Collective Bargaining,” out this week. The full table of contents for the issue can be found here. Recently released data from the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions brought…