This is another item that I am re-posting from Futility Closet (www.futilitycloset.com). It is re-posted with the permission of Greg Ross, who maintains the site. You can have daily updates from the site delivered to your e-mail each morning. ______________
Yesterday John K. Wilson wrote about the Kansas Board of Regents new policy mandating institutional oversight of the blog posts, tweets, and other public digital communications of faculty and staff at Kansas colleges and universities. Because it is not restricted to communications made with institutional resources, this policy goes well beyond violating of academic freedom,…
An “On the Issues” Post from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org] _______________ As happens too often in higher education these days, the recent push to increase college completion rates shows how laudable goals can become problematic when pursued in narrow, rigid ways. Who wouldn’t want to increase the numbers of college…
The article was written by my former student and friend Mike Lamm. Mike is a reporter for the Decatur Daily Democrat. This may be a somewhat desperate attempt to link the topic of this piece to academia, but after I read it, I couldn’t help but wonder how the folks who have done the R&D…
By Jeremi Suri, University of Texas at Austin Universities are a public trust. Citizens give their precious dollars to these schools with the understanding that their scholars will study, educate, and innovate for the future. Academics have freedom to think, and they also have an obligation to use their research for the broader public good.
As the first national AAUP president from a collective bargaining chapter, I frequently heard the Association described by some as “just another union” and by others as an irrelevant and ineffectual vestige of a less complicated and more innocent time. There are those who view the staff and the elected leadership as either politically naïve…
At Wright State, we have “Garcetti language” in our contract, protecting criticism of the administration as an aspect of academic freedom. We don’t abuse this right, but if our administration endorsed the sort of policy just approved by the Kansas Board of Regents for the public universities across that state, we would lambaste them on…
Yesterday, the Kansas Board of Regents adopted a new policy requiring all state universities to target social media, in retaliation for David Guth’s tweets (see my previous defense). In one mindless decision, the Kansas Regents have instantly adopted one of the worst campus speech codes ever seen in the entire country. This policy is clearly…
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis drew upon his prominence as the first American recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature to issue a national warning against the dangers of fascism. Huey Long was emerging as a likely candidate in the 1936 presidential election, and in the satiric novel It Can’t Happen Here, Lewis provided an extended…
By Hank Reichman, First Vice-President and Chair, Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, AAUP This blog is not usually a forum for discussion of internal AAUP organizational matters, but Peter Kirstein’s thoughtful posting on the Boyle case at NEIU merits engagement by someone from AAUP’s elected leadership, as does the lengthy comment on that posting…