BY JOHN K. WILSON Shouting down speakers, such as the recent suppression of Charles Murray’s speech at Middlebury College by a large crowd of protesters, is wrong. Plain and simple. It’s wrong. Shouting down speakers is morally wrong, unprincipled, anti-intellectual, and utterly indefensible. For a long time, I thought this was an obvious position, but…
BY LARA SCHWARTZ Guest blogger Lara Schwartz teaches law and government at American University School of Public Affairs. This is a cross-post of an essay that originally appeared on Huffington Post. We are sharing this here, with the permission of the author, because the original post generated a great deal of interest when shared on the AAUP Facebook…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL It’s enlightening to watch what issues surface when the subject of college faculty arises in the public arena. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose experience in higher education is minimal, offered her first substantive comments at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week when she called out faculty for silencing free speech:…
BY LAURA MARKWARDT Graduate workers with COGS at the University of Iowa are struggling for a fair contract in the midst of state legislation against working people in the public sector. COGS celebrated their 20th Anniversary last year, and the gains they’ve made for graduate employees and students over this time are being quickly erased. Today, COGS holds an action at the University of…
BY JOSHUA DOLEZAL Guest blogger Joshua Dolezal is a professor of English at Central College. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as Cather Studies, Literature and Medicine, and Medical Humanities. He is also the author of a memoir, Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging (University of Iowa Press, 2014). During my first year at a Christian…
BY GALEN LEONHARDY Guest blogger Galen Leonhardy teaches at Black Hawk College. For those who don’t know, we’ve had a recent hullabaloo at Black Hawk College in Moline, Illinois. I’ve written before about how American authoritarianism plays out at my small community college in the heartland, but this most recent episode provides a tale especially worth…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement was released by California Scholars for Academic Freedom: The newly inaugurated U.S. administration has created an atmosphere of violence, racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism. A less discussed aspect of these attacks is on academic freedom. The 2016 election has taken to new extremes the threats to academic freedom. We…
POSTED BY JOERG TIEDE The following resolution was adopted by the Fifty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors on April 17, 1971. Misconceptions of tenure are commonplace. For many groups and individuals tenure has become a conveniently simple explanation for what they perceive as a variety of educational ills. Tenure is not the…
BY AARON BARLOW If you want to teach students to think, you have to challenge them—challenge their beliefs and assumptions. Confirming what they (or their parents, or their communities) already believe does not serve that purpose. You also need to teach students to be honest with themselves and to examine their own beliefs by standards…
Shortly after the 2016 election, the AAUP warned that we could be facing the greatest threat to academic freedom since the McCarthy period. It now appears that such a warning was not misplaced. Extremists in the administration, Congress, and several state houses have created an atmosphere in which “alternative facts” reign supreme, and which encourages the introduction of legislation that threatens the core principles of our democracy.