POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following press release was submitted by members of the faculty at Mills College. By evening Monday May 3, the voting faculty of Mills College in Oakland, CA voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution of no confidence (73% voted in favor of the resolution, 16% voted no, and 11% abstained) against…
POSTED BY SARAH MINK Spring 2021 | Vol. 107, No. 2 The spring 2021 issue of Academe builds on the campaign for a New Deal for Higher Education launched earlier this year by the AAUP, the American Federation of Teachers, and other allies. Contributors to the issue respond to the crisis now confronting higher education, calling for bold…
BY NADINE STROSSEN The following is a letter to Columbia University President Lee Bollinger from Nadine Strossen, the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School, Past National President of the American Civil Liberties Union (1991-2008), and author of HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship. Dear Lee,…
BY THE CAMPUS POLICE WORKING GROUP The following is an excerpt, with source citations removed, from the recently released report On Campus Police Forces. In July 2020, the AAUP appointed a Campus Police Working Group and charged its members with drafting a report on the role of police on campus, the appropriateness of higher education…
BY HANK REICHMAN When last October Zoom declined to host seminars at San Francisco State University and New York University because one of the speakers, Leila Khaled, was associated with a group deemed “terrorist” by the U.S. government, which the company suggested might make it legally vulnerable, faculty groups and defenders of academic freedom protested. …
BY KEVIN L. COPE, Treasurer, Louisiana Conference of the AAUP Whether in William Herschel’s telescopic glimpses of stars, Shakespeare’s character Hamlet’s decision to unravel the state of Denmark, or the votes of faculty senates on their legislative measures, resolution tends to occur quickly, within a fleeting instant. Few stopwatches are fast enough to measure that…
BY RICHARD J. REDDICK AND LISA L. MOORE “Have you gotten the shot?” It’s springtime, and those of us in higher education are beginning to cautiously imagine some kind of return to campus later this year. Many are calling not for a return to “normal” but to a revisioning of our habits, assumptions, and structures—many…
BY KIRA T. LAWRENCE As a climate scientist, I’ve watched in disbelief as decades of denial and can-kicking have resulted in the leading edge of the climate crisis wreaking havoc across the world. For years, I have felt like I’ve been aboard the carbon train with the rest of humanity, telling passengers to brace for…
BY GINA TIGRI Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party? This question was famously asked numerous times in the hearings held by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) amid the anti-Communist frenzy known as the Red Scare in the McCarthy era. A new higher education bill was recently…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY When the AAUP made funds available to all state conferences last year, I, as the state president of the Georgia conference, had an idea. This academic year we have had six presidents in our state’s public higher education system, which includes twenty-six institutions, announce that they were leaving. When we received word…