BY JOHN K. WILSON Free Speech Week is being held October 19-25, 2020 to celebrate freedom of speech and freedom of the press. To help mark Free Speech Week, here are a few events (including one featuring me on October 20) being held on the week (as well as some other academic events this week…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH The following is a call to action shared by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) Organizing Collective regarding the censorship by Zoom and Facebook of an online event at San Francisco State University. Read a previous blog post about it by John Wilson and others…
BY CHARLIE TYSON AND NAOMI ORESKES A couple of years ago, we decided to look at the question of liberal bias in the American academy. Are American colleges and universities disproportionately liberal and biased against conservatives? For most conservatives, and even some liberals, the answer is obvious. We wanted to examine whether the claim was…
BY HANK REICHMAN Historian Lora Burnett has been completing a book on the culture wars and the conflict over “western civilization.” She never thought she would have to add a chapter to her book about her own experiences as a professor. Until yesterday. Burnett, who goes by L.D. Burnett on Twitter where she has over…
BY KIMBERLY HARDING Spring 2020 was the unanticipated semester. Few thought in January 2020 that we would be teaching remotely by the end of March. Even then, hope existed that Fall 2020 would emerge as a more “normal” semester. This hope has since been put to rest for most institutions of higher learning. During this…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Our AAUP Chapters of the Colorado Community College System (CCCS) recently published a timeline listing milestones in our first seven years of organizing. While we have yet to achieve our goal of equal pay for equal work and truly shared governance, our influence in the statewide, thirteen-college Colorado Community College System has…
BY THE NATIONAL COALITION AGAINST CENSORSHIP The National Coalition Against Censorship today sent this letter, co-signed by the AAUP, to Zoom, Facebook, and Youtube regarding the censorship of an event at San Francisco State University. October 8, 2020 Dear Mr. Yuan, Mr. Zuckerberg, and Ms. Wojcicki: As organizations dedicated to protecting freedom of expression, the…
BY AMERICAN COUNCIL ON EDUCATION AND HIGHER ED ASSOCIATIONS The AAUP was one of fifty-five higher education associations that signed a letter sent on September 30 by the American Council on Education (ACE) to the US Department of Education secretary Betsy DeVos opposing the department’s announcement that it would investigate Princeton University after university president…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On September 29 I had the honor and privilege of participating, along with fellow AAUP Committee A member Joan Wallach Scott, in a webinar on academic freedom and student activism sponsored by the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania. The discussion was moderated by…
BY SOCIOLOGICAL ORGANIZATION PRESIDENTS The following letter was sent on September 30 by presidents of sociological organizations to express concern about threatened consequences for two sociology professors who participated in September 8 and 9 #Scholarstrike activities. It was initially signed by twelve presidents, and an additional president signed on later. TO: President Michael K. Young…