POSTED BY THE AAUP Increasingly violent clashes between student protesters and police at universities in Hong Kong raise grave concerns for the American Association of University Professors. On November 17, police laid siege to the campus of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where they employed tear gas, rubber bullets, and water cannons against students, journalists, and…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for University World News, Brendan O’Malley reports that Dr. Ahmadreza Djalali is facing a death sentence in Iran after being convicted of spying for Israel. At the time of his arrest and detainment, Djalali was teaching disaster medicine at two European universities—the Karolinkska Institute in Sweden and the Vrije Universiteit…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the year since the attempted coup in Turkey, a “staggering” number of academics have faced criminal investigations, detentions, prosecutions, mass dismissal, expulsion and restrictions on travel, according to an open letter to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, signed by Robert Quinn, executive director of Scholars at Risk (SAR), the New…
BY KELLY HAND In March the AAUP issued a statement protesting Turkish suppression of academic freedom as the government punished professors who had signed an Academics for Peace petition calling for an end to the military campaign against Kurdish separatists. AAUP vice president and Committee A chair Henry Reichman, coauthor of the statement along with AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum,…
Today is the start of the Scholars at Risk 2016 Global Congress, “Universities in a Dangerous World: Defending Higher Education Communities and Values” at McGill University in Montreal. If you are not fortunate enough to be in Montreal in person with us, you can watch a livestream of all the events beginning today at 1pm…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week, Robert Quinn, the executive director of Scholars at Risk, an international network of higher education institutions in 39 countries with headquarters at New York University, published an op-ed piece in the Washington Post entitled “The War on Education.” The attack last week at Pakistan’s Bacha Khan University that killed 22 and…
The following appeared in the January 15 issue of University World News and has been highlighted in the weekly Academic Freedom Media Review published by Scholars at Risk, which tracks violations of academic freedom and civil liberties in colleges and universities around the world. While the AAUP does not generally take formal positions on violations…