Linfield University: Planning Obsolescence?

BY DAVID PALUMBO-LIU In the past several years, Linfield University in Oregon has gained a reputation for creating a hostile work environment. One reason is that it has displayed a willingness to harass and even fire tenured faculty who are willing to point out its failures in key areas like sexual harassment, faculty governance, and…

on a wooden surface, a book with a worn cover has a chain with a padlock around it

Book Banning Past and Present and the Rights of Young Readers

 BY HARVEY J. GRAFF  Today’s campaigns to ban books in schools—nationally organized and well-funded by right-wing donors and interest groups—are unprecedented, unconstitutional, and inhumane. Their instigators, unlike predecessors who led past campaigns, are ignorant of the texts they seek to erase, and sometimes burn. They have no understanding of “the people” or “public interest”; children’s…

books on three wooden shelves in the shape of a speech bubble

Trouble in the “Heart of the University”

BY TWO TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY LIBRARIANS The news has been inundated with reports of relentless attacks on intellectual freedom and attacks on libraries. Just last week a blog detailed the many ways in which books and information are being challenged in schools and in public service sectors. Less well-reported, however, is the ongoing attack on…

logo of Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition United Electrical

You Don’t Have to Be a Labor Activist to Support the Graduate Student Workers Strike

BY JEFFREY C. ISAAC Over 1,700 of the roughly 2,400 graduate student workers at Indiana University have signed union cards affiliating with the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition with the United Electrical Workers union. The Indiana University administration has refused to recognize or even to meet with coalition leaders. And after years of seeking recognition, the…

Group of AAUP/AFT at the Colorado state capitol

Facts Disarm Threats to Proposed Colorado Collective Bargaining Bill

BY CAPRICE LAWLESS It is not only Colorado’s thousands of higher education faculty who stand to benefit through collective bargaining, but also Colorado’s hundreds of thousands of college students, their parents, and our state’s 5.7 million  taxpayers. Why? Because when employers and employees make decisions together through collective bargaining, those negotiations require disclosure of financial…

Russian Student Journalists Sentenced to “Corrective Labor”

BY HANK REICHMAN Four journalists associated with an independent Moscow student magazine were sentenced April 12 to two years’ “corrective labor” for creating and posting an online video in which they defended young Russians’ freedom of assembly.  Armen Aramyan, Natasha Tyshkevich, Alla Gutnikova and Volodya Metelkin, participants in the editorial collective of the journal DOXA,…

Testing the Limits of Academic Freedom

BY REBECCA T. ALPERT The following remarks were delivered as part of an online forum on “The Assault on Academic Freedom” sponsored by Temple University April 7. I want to focus today on my own experience of academic freedom in two very different (but related) locations: in and also beyond the classroom.  Academic freedom in…