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…
Here are some relatively recent headlines that I have collected: Former Al-Qaeda Barber Seized in Iraq American without Arab Roots Almosts Wins “Arabs Got Talent!” Andy Kauffman’s Brother Says He’s the Victim of a Hoax Biologists Use Cannons to Capture and Tag Endangered Birds Celebrating the Holidays behind Bars China to Send Pig Sperm to…
An AAUP report this month on the case of John Boyle (see more about it in the post by Peter Kirstein earlier today), an assistant professor of linguistics at Northeastern Illinois University, raises once more the problem of using the vague term “collegiality” in questions of the granting of tenure. The NEIU president, an AAUP…
Today, the AAUP released its report on Northeastern Illinois University dealing with the tenure case of John Boyle. Peter N. Kirstein of the Illinois AAUP comments on the process in this case. By Peter N. Kirstein, St. Xavier University One of the unresolved structural problems within the AAUP is the relationship between State Conferences’ Committee A…