BY JOHN K. WILSON Heterodox Academy has issued a new survey of college students that is being touted as evidence that students fear controversial issues. But there are some critical questions that need to be asked.about it. The survey repeatedly asked the following style of question (about politics, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, the 2020…
BY THE AMERICAN COUNCIL OF LEARNED SOCIETIES On Friday, March 5, 2021, Iowa lawmakers vote on legislation that would end tenure for faculty at Iowa’s three public universities. The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) issued the following letter to leaders of the Iowa House of Representatives and State Senate, as well as Governor Kim…
BY HANK REICHMAN The AAUP issued the following statement today. Three proposals currently under consideration by the Iowa Legislature raise troubling concerns about academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus. One bill would end tenure for professors at the state’s three public universities. Tenure provides that after a suitable probationary period a faculty member…
BY SANDRA STEINGRABER The following column by Sandra Steingraber, distinguished scholar in residence in the Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences at Ithaca College, appeared in the March 3 edition of The Ithacan. For the past 18 years, I have served as our campus’ scholar in residence, recruited by a previous provost with a vision…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, issued a 195-page report, “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship” and published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Academic Freedom Is…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS The sobering social and economic costs of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic cannot be overstated. The challenge for teachers to keep working via Zoom are not so much physical now, as they are mental and emotional, especially for those of us used to teaching face-to-face in classrooms. Being in Zoom rooms too often…
BY JOHN K. WILSON In an extraordinary attack on academic freedom, three fellows from Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution–Scott Atlas, Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson–are demanding censorship of faculty and the student newspaper in order to silence criticism of themselves. They write in an article at the Stanford Review (a conservative student publication), “as individuals we…
BY DEBORAH CAFIERO During the COVID-19 crisis, the pace of cuts to foreign language departments and programs, already brisk before the pandemic, has accelerated. The devaluation of language study is necessary, so the argument goes, to reduce costs and trim programs that elicit minimal student interest. Besides, English is becoming the lingua franca of the…
BY MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ AND MICHAEL DECESARE In September, the AAUP announced an investigation of the crisis in academic governance that has occurred in the wake of the pandemic. The investigation’s initial focus was on seven institutions; the following month, an eighth was added to the list. Never before in the Association’s 106-year history has a governance…
BY JONATHAN PORITZ AND JONATHAN REES When we wrote about “Academic Freedom in Online Education” for the winter 2021 Academe released this month, we tried hard not to focus too much on the pandemic. While many faculty members have only come to online education because COVID-19 has made it unsafe to teach in any physical…