BY JOAN W. SCOTT This essay is adapted from the author’s contribution to a forum the Johns Hopkins University AAUP chapter organized to discuss Lisa Siraganian’s Academe article “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity.” As with so many other liberal principles, the Right has seized and perverted the seemingly benign pluralism implied by “viewpoint diversity” to…
BY ERIC J. WEINER Although Lisa Siraganian’s recent article ”Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity” includes important considerations for the heterodox academic community, her theses do more to distort the intentions and purposes of heterodoxical teaching and learning than to illuminate its potential conflicts and contradictions. Siraganian’s general critique of “viewpoint diversity” is that it is…
BY DALE E. MILLER In “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity,” Professor Lisa Siraganian throws down a gauntlet. After offering “seven theses against viewpoint diversity in any of its guises,” she writes that “if viewpoint diversity means committing oneself to a robust debate about truth and values, then the movement should be open to responding to…
BY THE AAUP The AAUP issued the following statement today. In an ostensible effort to protect “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” on public college and university campuses, the Florida legislature has approved legislation that, like similar proposals this year in Iowa and elsewhere, amounts to what the AAUP has repeatedly described as a “solution in…
BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN The right has recently adopted the language of “viewpoint diversity” in their critique of allegedly liberal professors. “Diversity” sounds nice (how could one be against it?) and, coupled with “viewpoint,” has a ring of freedom about it. But this rhetoric barely masks the intent: to justify hiring conservative faculty and creating conservative…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last year the AAUP’s Committee on Government Relations released a report, “Campus Free-Speech Legislation: History, Progress, and Problems,” which concluded that campus free-speech laws and academic freedom are “false friends.” Nevertheless, such legislation continues to advance in several states. Especially troubling is a proposal that has moved out of committee in the…
BY RESHMI DUTT-BALLERSTADT We find ourselves living in a precarious space and time within our institutions where suddenly there has been a resurgence in appeals to civility codes (that perhaps started with Steven Salaita’s firing from University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, in August 2014 as a result of his tweets). Following the election of Donald…