Michael Bérubé

Faculty Forum: Cary Nelson: An Appreciation

I was elected to the national Council of the AAUP in 2005, just as Cary Nelson was running for the presidency. My first year on the Council was intensely dismaying. Academic freedom was under threat, the culture wars had been reheated in the aftermath of September 11, and David Horowitz was urging state legislatures to pass his “Academic Bill of Rights” to combat what he considered leftist indoctrination in the classroom. Tenure was being eroded by the overuse and exploitation of faculty hired off the tenure track.

Editor's Introduction - Volume 6

This is introduction to Volume 6 of the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom by the journal's editor, Michael Bérubé. He explains that half of the journal's articles discuss the controversy surrounding Steven Salaita and his "dehiring" by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The other eight articles in the volume discuss other pressing issues, including challenges to and violations of AAUP policies and principles.

State of the Profession: Freedom in the Classroom—and in the Trump Era

A week after the election of Donald Trump, over a hundred students and faculty members at my institution, Pennsylvania State University, met to talk about What It All Meant. Tensions ran high, and there was a heated argument over whether misogyny or white supremacism was primarily to blame for Trump’s freakish win (we would not know for another week or two that he performed no better in the popular vote than did Michael Dukakis in 1988).

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