BY PEDRO GARCÍA-CARO The University of Oregon’s Office of the Provost will host an online conference devoted to “Academic Freedom and the Public University” on Friday, October 14, 2022. Building on the university’s public defense of academic freedom, we invite faculty and administrators from other colleges and universities to participate. This conference will focus on…
BY JOAN W. SCOTT In the annals of academic freedom, Chandler Davis (Chan, as he was known to family and friends), who died last month, was a towering figure. His principled refusal to comply (on First Amendment grounds) with a HUAC investigation of communism at the University of Michigan, led to his dismissal from the…
BY JANE S. GABIN Many have read the Chronicle of Higher Education’s latest survey of public university presidents’ salaries and are appropriately horrified: sixteen presidents make over $1 million a year. This underlines the overall problem with US higher education: too many people are making too much money. Higher education in the United States has…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of an address delivered remotely, via Zoom, to the concluding session of a conference, “Universities at the Crossroads: Academic Freedom in a Changing World,” at GAU-Georgian American University, Tbilisi, Georgia, on October 1. Let me begin by thanking the organizers of this most important and interesting conference…
BY ALEX SMALL Breathe easy, everyone. We physicists have a strategy to help all students pass tough introductory classes. Hear me out. An administrator recently said that more students would pass freshman physics if faculty gave more frequent and early feedback. Students could study more effectively if they had some way to gauge their understanding…
BY JENNIFER RUTH I was happy on Thursday to see the AAUP statement — reproduced below — on the University of Idaho’s attempt to enforce “neutrality” on the topic of abortion among its faculty when they are in the classroom. I was stunned when I read about the University of Idaho administration’s “guidance” to maintain…
BY KEVIN HOWLEY Call me cynical, but any piece of legislation or policy prescription that receives bipartisan support these days gives me the willies. When Democrats and Republicans agree on anything, it usually involves bloated military budgets or, in the case of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill, doubling down on roads and bridges in the…
BY JENNIFER RUTH It’s worth highlighting an AAUP toolkit from the past in light of these two alarming articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education — “Public University Curricula are Government Speech, Florida Says” and “It’s Not Clear Whether Public-College Professors have First Amendment Rights When They’re Teaching”: The AAUP Action Plan for Protecting an…
BY TIMOTHY V. KAUFMAN-OSBORN In a bold move, sixteen faculty, staff, students, and alumni recently filed a suit calling on Washington’s attorney general to remove from office six trustees, including the interim president, of Seattle Pacific University (SPU). Given the real risks involved, especially for those currently on SPU’s payroll, we should applaud these plaintiffs…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF Growing up was always hard to do. It’s getting harder, and universities now are doing little to help the new “lost generation.” Experts on children, youth, and college students never tire of superficial generalizations about the ease or difficulty of growing up over time. They seldom define terms, specify ages, present…