What Is a University President to Do?

BY HANK REICHMAN Last week the AAUP released a special investigative report, “Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System.”  In interview after interview with faculty members in Florida, the investigating committee, which I co-chaired, “heard repeated complaints not only about the silence of their campus and system administrators but also about…

Statement of the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee on Marc Rowan’s Questions to Penn Trustees

BY THE AAUP-PENN EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE This morning, Marc Rowan, CEO of private equity firm Apollo Global Management in New York, who initiated the successful effort to remove University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill, distributed an email to the university’s trustees posing a series of eighteen questions, several of which raise serious concerns about the fate…

Statements of the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee on the Resignation of President Magill and the December 5 Congressional Hearing

BY THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF AAUP-PENN The following statement was issued by the executive committee of the University of Pennsylvania AAUP chapter on December 9 in response to the resignation of Penn President Elizabeth Magill following her much-criticized testimony before a Congressional committee. In recent months, trustees, donors, lobbying organizations, and members of Congress have…

On Threats to Academic Freedom, University Governance, and Safety at the University of Pennsylvania

BY THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA CHAPTER, AAUP The following statement was issued on October 28, 2023. Over the past few weeks, the Executive Committee of the University of Pennsylvania chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP-Penn) has heard from scores of colleagues who, like us, are gravely concerned about violations of…

Amy Wax, Academic Freedom, “Official” Positions, and the “Fitness” Standard

BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday Princeton political scientist and legal scholar Keith Whittington posted to this blog a piece entitled “Academic Freedom, Even for Amy Wax.”  Wax is a University of Pennsylvania law professor whose extramural expression, most recently at the pro-Trump National Conservatism Conference, has been widely condemned as intolerant and racist.  More than 1,000…

Academic Freedom, Even for Amy Wax

Guest blogger Keith E. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University and the author of Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech. Amy Wax, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, has once again annoyed her colleagues and students and provoked calls for her prompt dismissal. It…

Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others

In a posting last week on Minding the Campus, Herbert London endorsed an effort to banish anti-Semitism on campus, noting “The Israel Law Center warns that colleges and universities ‘may be liable for massive damage’ if they fail to prevent anti-Semitism. London also praises the Israel Law Center’s reference to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling…