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…
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…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today more than 3,000 student workers at Columbia University in New York City went on strike after more than two years of unsuccessful negotiations over the university’s first graduate student labor contract. The walkout comes more than four years after student workers voted to unionize, forming the Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto…
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,…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS A hefty third wave of federal funds is headed to higher education, and millions of it to Colorado’s Community College System. Today Pres. Joe Biden signed into law the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). The bill includes $40 billion for public higher education. These funds follow the 2020 CARES Act that…
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…