BY PHILIPP W. ROSEMANN On June 14, 2024, the Board of Trustees of the University of Kentucky followed President Eli Capilouto’s recommendation to approve a number of fundamental changes to the governance structures of Kentucky’s flagship university. The board’s actions included the abolition, with immediate effect, of the university senate, which for one hundred years…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH On June 18, the executive committee of AAUP Local 6741 of the American Federation of Teachers issued the following statement on University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s proposal to close the College of General Studies In the United States, the university is in crisis. There is no starker evidence of this emergency than recent…
POSTED BY HASSAN MELEHY In response to reports in April and May of a colleague’s classes being secretly recorded by an associate dean, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s AAUP chapter has issued the following statement. Details on the recording incident involving Professor Larry Chavis of UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, may be found…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH For the June 3rd meeting of Portland State University’s Faculty Senate, twenty-one faculty and staff members submitted the following question for PSU President Ann Cudd: In your remarks to Senate last month and in your email “Evolving Community Expectations” on 5/7/2024, you refer to “vile messages” and to ‘”that kind of…
BY HANK REICHMAN Sociologist, antiwar activist, and internationally renowned Marxist thinker Boris Kagarlitsky, a professor at the Moscow Higher School of Economics and head of the Moscow think tank The Institute for Globalization Studies and Social Movements, who was convicted of “justifying terrorism” for remarks he made about Russia’s war against Ukraine and sentenced to…
BY IAN LUSTICK The following is the text of remarks delivered at a rally in support of academic freedom at the University of Pennsylvania on January 22, 2024. First let me say that I have nothing against billionaires. While I can’t say that some of my best friends are billionaires, I can say that, from…
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…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH This open letter to the world from Gaza academics and university administrators was published yesterday by Al Jazeera here. On May 6, Israel’s cabinet voted to ban Al Jazeera and shut down its local offices. Among the many things American academics might do in response to help, one would be to…
BY ALAN SINGER On May 3, fifty-nine students and other protesters were arrested at New York University and The New School, a partner institution, who had created an encampment protesting against the continued Israeli assault on Gaza. According to New School president Donna Shalala, she asked the NYPD to arrest demonstrators because they were blocking…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of my May 15, 2024, keynote address to the international symposium, “Academic Freedom in the Twenty-First Century,” sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundations and the Academia Europaea HERCuLES in Stockholm, Sweden. A slightly expanded version will be published next year, along with other symposium presentations, in European Review. …
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.…
BY JONATHAN REES Did your online social life survive the Great Twitter Exodus of 2022? Although I’ve found Mastodon to be somewhat useful in this regard, I lost track of far too many online “friends” to count. That has only just now started to change. For example, Audrey Watters made her well-earned reputation during the…
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 MATTHEW BOEDY As Emory University sent police in late April to raid a student protest encampment—during which at least three faculty were arrested, one thrown to the ground—my state’s largest newspaper asked me as president of the state AAUP conference for my thoughts on the national situation that engulfed more than seventy-five public college…
