POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following open letter to Yale University President Peter Salovey appeared yesterday in the Yale Daily News. Dear President Salovey: As members of the Yale Law faculty, we write to express our disagreement with your May 3, 2017 public letter regarding graduate student teaching fellow unionization. In the letter, you suggest that…
BY KELLY HAND The AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom—the only journal dedicated exclusively to scholarship on academic freedom and its relation to shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining—is searching for a new faculty editor. This online publication includes scholarship from the perspective of various academic disciplines and is international in its scope. If you are a faculty member…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Three months ago, I attacked a bill in the Tennessee legislature, the “Tennessee Freedom of Speech on College Campus Bill,” and wrote that it was “a disaster for everyone. It imposes bizarre and burdensome regulations that administrators will struggle to understand and implement. It takes away from professors the ability…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday I posted the first in a series of posts on the free speech rights of invited campus speakers. I fully expected to devote much of today to preparing the next installment. But this morning Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos delivered the commencement address at Bethune-Cookman University, an historically black institution in…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Last week’s efforts that led to the passage by one vote of a House Republican proposal to change health care illustrates the deeper questions now bubbling up about what Americans demand of their government. The Republican-controlled Senate will now take up their version of a health care plan that is likely…
BY HANK REICHMAN AB 847, a bill currently under consideration in the California Assembly, would require the local academic senate of a campus of the California State University or of a campus of the California Community Colleges, and would request the local academic senate of a campus of the University of California, to post its…
BY HANK REICHMAN “A university without student protests against visiting speakers would be like a forest without birds.” — Timothy Garton Ash, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, p. 155 This is the first of three four posts in a series. The issue of the right of controversial and sometimes deeply offensive invited…
BY GWENDOLYN BRADLEY Responding to reports that the University of North Carolina Board of Governors is considering barring centers on the university’s campuses from providing legal representation, AAUP President Rudy Fichtenbaum released the following statement today: Founded in 2001 by the legendary African American civil rights attorney Julius Chambers, the UNC Center for Civil Rights…
POSTED BY KELLY HAND Today, a strong majority of graduate employees at the University of Chicago filed authorization cards with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to hold a formal union recognition election. Members of Graduate Students United (GSU) personally visited the regional NLRB office to deliver the cards, signed by grad workers from seven…
BY KENNETH S. STERN AND ERNST BENJAMIN This is a guest post by Kenneth S. Stern and Ernst Benjamin. Kenneth S. Stern is the Executive Director of the Justus & Karin Rosenberg Foundation, and a Fellow of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College (where he has taught a course on antisemitism as a Visiting…