Adjuncts and Academic Freedom

BY EVA SWIDLER Guest blogger Eva Swidler is an environmental historian on the undergraduate liberal arts faculty at Goddard College and the Curtis Institute of Music. She also researches and writes in the fields of labor studies and political economy. Academic freedom is all the rage in newspapers these days. Are protests at speaking events on…

U of Chicago Faculty Letter to the Students

BY UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO FACULTY The following open letter from University of Chicago faculty appeared in the Chicago Maroon on Sept. 13. Dear Students of the Class of 2020: As you have undoubtedly noticed, you and your new institution have been in the media spotlight lately. We want to take this opportunity to voice our…

When a University President Becomes a Scold

Dr. Everett Piper, the President of Oklahoma Wesleyan, has brought a great deal of attention to himself and to his institution because of a blog post that he wrote to students. The most widely quoted portion of the post has been its closing: “At OKWU, we teach you to be selfless rather than self-centered. We…

Success at Crafton Hills!

The following comes from the July 2 edition of the San Bernardino Press-Enterprise: San Bernardino Community College District Chancellor Bruce Baron has said the district will not require instructors to place disclaimers on their course descriptions in the wake of a protest by a student last month. Initially, Crafton Hills College President Cheryl Marshall said…

On Trigger Warnings: I Am Issuing a Sort of Gatling- Gun Salvo of Trigger Warnings Ahead of Your Reading This Post

There is almost no contemporary fiction that I could confidently describe as being universally inoffensive. I mean this without any snideness whatsoever, but I don’t know how English faculty at Christian colleges and universities manage to teach any courses in contemporary literature. I occasionally teach an interdisciplinary Honors seminar called “The Meanings of Rivers,” in…

On Trigger Warnings

This report was drafted by a subcommittee of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure in August 2014 and has been approved by Committee A. A current threat to academic freedom in the classroom comes from a demand that teachers provide warnings in advance if assigned material contains anything that might trigger difficult emotional responses…

"Trigger Warnings" on Campus

By Bill Ayers (reposted from billayers.org) The call for “trigger warnings”—a recent censorious trend gaining traction on American college campuses—is designed to alert students of any potentially troubling, unsettling, or upsetting course materials. The impetus is benign enough, and the context includes the important recent mobilization to deal seriously with epidemic levels of rape and…