AURCO Announces Lunch Speaker Series

The Association for University Regional Campuses of Ohio (AURCO) has announced a free virtual lunch series taking place April 5-9 between 11:00 am and 2:00 pm each day. The free series features a great lineup of speakers from several campuses presenting on a wide range of subjects. If you are interested in attending any of the online…

Academic Freedom and the Goldwater Rule

BY HANK REICHMAN Bandy Lee, a former Yale University faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine, filed suit in federal court March 22 against the University alleging “unlawful termination… due to her exercise of free speech about the dangers of Donald Trump’s presidency.”  Lee charges that Yale fired her in…

Claiming the Mantle of Academic Freedom

BY JOHN K. WILSON Jennifer Ruth, who is a contributing editor here at AcademeBlog as well as a professor of film studies at Portland State University (PSU) and a member of the AAUP’s Committee A, published an important op-ed this week in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and so I wanted to offer my critique…

red circle with white center that shows the words "STOP HATE" in the center, on a gray background

Statement on Anti-Asian Hate

BY THE AAUP We stand in sorrow and solidarity with Asian and Asian-American communities, who are facing an escalating series of racist attacks, including this week’s horrific attack in Georgia, in which anti-Asian racism compounded with misogyny evidently resulted in the murder of eight people. Anti-Asian racism has been a recurring theme in United States…

The Academic Freedom Alliance: A Q&A with Keith Whittington

BY JOHN K. WILSON The new Academic Freedom Alliance launched on March 8, 2021. Below is my interview via email with Keith E. Whittington, Chair of the Academic Committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and the author of Speak Freely: Why Universities Must…

A+ circles with a red pencil

Why and How I Stopped Grading

BY DAVID MASON In January of 2020, I decided not to grade anymore. It wasn’t a nod to the chaos of a pandemic, which had not yet affected the United States. I had stumbled onto Jesse Stommel’s “How to Ungrade,” which pointed to a body of work on the topic. On the realness of the…

In Defense of Sandra Sellers and David Batson

BY JOHN K. WILSON This past week, Georgetown law school fired adjunct professor Sandra Sellers (and suspended her co-instructor David Batson) for an accidentally recorded conversation about racial disparities in student grades. In the video, which was recorded in February when the taping of the class continued after all the students had left the session,…