BY DAVID G. EMBRICK AND JOHNNY E. WILLIAMS While Israel is actively erasing Palestinians’ land, livelihoods, stories, personhoods, and histories, the United States is providing Israel with funding, technical assistance, hardware, and even language to carry out its ongoing brutal and violent absorption of Palestine into Israel. Though this violation of international law is widely…
Guest blogger Keith E. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University and the author of Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech. Amy Wax, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, has once again annoyed her colleagues and students and provoked calls for her prompt dismissal. It…
BY HANK REICHMAN Be forewarned! This post is an act of shameless self-promotion. That’s because it announces that today, April 2, is the official publication date of my new book The Future of Academic Freedom. Consisting of ten interlinked essays–the publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, calls them “audacious”–the book “aims to bring to discussions of…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following press statement was issued by a group of graduate students at Columbia University, announcing Academic Freedom Week, a series of panel discussions to be held at Columbia April 9-11. Your silence will not protect you. ― Audre Lorde, The battle for academic freedom at our nation’s universities has been…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL American higher education is a complex, decentralized, and interlocking network of institutions that provide education to a disparate group of learners. Historically, many of the fundamentals build around an applicant cohort of 18- to 22-year olds. The demographics of the 21st century predict that this group will not be able to…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the greatest of all American scholars and intellectuals. To commemorate the occasion and explore the lessons of DuBois’s life and work for our time, the always thought-provoking Black Perspectives blog of the African American Intellectual History Society has…
BY MARIAH QUINN An article from Breitbart yesterday offers us a timely look at how targeted harassment happens and how it is perpetuated. The misrepresentations start in the headline. The piece, “American Association of University Professors Defends Prof Who Called for the Death of Congressman Scalise,” focused on the work the AAUP is doing to…
BY JOERG TIEDE Over the course of the last year, targeted online harassment of faculty has emerged as a significant threat to academic freedom. Fueled by websites such as Professor Watchlist, Campus Reform, and College Fix, campaigns of threats and harassment are directed against faculty members for what they are reported to have said in…
POSTED BY KELLY HAND The new issue of Academe considers the state of the academic profession in a political climate that has exacerbated existing threats to higher education. Articles focus on challenges to academic freedom and collective bargaining, the recent upsurge in harassment campaigns targeting faculty members, and faculty activism. Follow the links in the table of…