BY DANIEL A. SEGAL Several AFT locals—including Local 6741, which represents all AAUP members in advocacy chapters—have put forward resolutions for consideration at next week’s AFT convention in support of divestment by the AFT of its Israeli state bond holding. Calls for divestment typically face questions about the opacity and complexity of particular financial instruments.…
BY DAVID MOSHMAN Discussions about campus matters related to Gaza, including posts on this blog, have focused on free speech issues associated with campus protests. Let me shift the focus. Universities should indeed support freedom of speech, but their primary function is to seek and communicate the truth, including the truth about Gaza, and their…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY The Georgia conference of the AAUP recently published its semi-annual newsletter and I thought readers of this blog might be interested in one element of it. The conference asked from the state university system all complaints concerning academic freedom and freedom of speech submitted to the system’s confidential ethics hotline within the…
BY JOE LOCKARD I am not a stranger to protests on behalf of the Palestinian people and their right to self-determination. I have attended numerous protests in Israel and the occupied territories, including the 1983 Peace Now rally where a far-right murderer threw a hand grenade that killed the Israeli teacher and activist Emil Grunzweig.…
BY RACHEL IDA BUFF University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. I had a rough day at work on Friday for the usual reasons: administrative overreach, lack of support for the actual education work of the university. As on countless previous occasions, I left my office discouraged. But this day was different from a thousand other Fridays on campus.…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH I asked permission to post the Jewish Voice for Peace-Portland chapter’s letter to Portland State University President Ann Cudd. It works through some points in a way that I find helpful. I hope you do, too. May 13, 2024 Dear President Cudd, Many campuses across this country, including PSU, have been…
BY HASSAN MELEHY “That flag will stand here as long as I’m chancellor,” Lee Roberts, chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, proudly proclaimed on Tuesday, April 30, after restoring the American flag to the pole adorning Polk Place on the UNC campus in Chapel Hill. As the campus community and many…
BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE We are now seeing how holocausts happen. We are seeing how people who dare to speak out against massive state violence—in this case, college students protesting Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza—are being beaten and arrested at the behest of university leaders, who in turn are acting as agents of the Israel-allied US…
BY ISAAC KAMOLA In February I gave a talk at Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought, alongside colleagues discussing the question “Where is the University?” The panel was planned prior to Columbia’s then-shocking ban on Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace. In January, we inquired about the status of the boycott…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Yesterday, Columbia threatened student protesters, “if you do not leave by 2 p.m., you will be suspended pending further investigation.” This interim suspension included banishment from campus, a prohibition on attending classes, and eviction from campus housing. All organizations committed to campus free expression should call for a total ban on…