Academic Freedom

Negotiating Academic Freedom: A Cautionary Tale

In recent years, there has been a growing concern among academics that traditional protections of academic freedom have been eroded by increasingly intrusive and somewhat ill-informed court decisions. The most recent and prime example of this is the Garcetti v. Ceballos decision by the US Supreme Court and, more alarmingly, its progeny in other courts. Those decisions, and their implications, are the subject of a recently released AAUP special report, Protecting an Independent Faculty Voice: Academic Freedom after Garcetti v. Ceballos. In brief, the Garcetti decision said that in the course of carrying out one’s public employment responsibilities, an employee did not have First Amendment protections of free speech outside the classroom.

Academic Freedom in a State-Sponsored African University: The Case of the University of Mauritius

This paper discusses the issue of academic freedom in the context of Mauritius, with a focus on its first university, the University of Mauritius. The University of Mauritius was set up in the late 1960s, at a time when poverty was rampant in the country and access to education was reserved for the privileged. A government policy of widening access to education has led to a subsidization of education on a national scale and, consequently, to the university being state-funded. Therefore, students pursuing full-time undergraduate degrees do not have to pay tuition.

Academic Freedom in Principle and Practice: The Case of Algeria

Academic freedom in Africa has attracted much attention recently, but few examinations of the subject have incorporated Algeria. On many occasions, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika underlined the crucial role of education and academic institutions in national development, for social transformation, and for the deepening of democracy. The university, he once pointed out, needs to sustain its academic and research endeavors with a view to “meeting social demand for higher learning in an efficient manner and improving the quality of its teaching and research programs.”To reach this goal, additional prestigious national schools specializing in engineering, technology, management, journalism, and political science, to name but a few, had been created in 2009 with the aim of establishing a separate sector of higher education parallel to the universities. The areas of scientific research, technological development, and others have received tremendous financial support from the government. Such results, said the president, will be put to good use in helping the national economy and supporting policies geared towards improving the standard of living of Algerian citizens. However, the state’s efforts frequently conflict with the academic institutions’ policies and their leaders’ private interests, giving rise to encroachments on academic freedom.

 

Editor's Introduction - Volume 2

Whether by chance or by fate, the Spring 2011 issue of the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom has turned out to be rather timely. At a moment when faculty unionization is paradoxically at once resurgent and under assault, Bill Lyne lays out rather clearly what its benefits can be for shared governance. John Champagne and John W. Powell mount philosophical, political, and pedagogical critiques of the relentlessly expanding assessment movement.

Teaching in the Corporate University: Assessment as a Labor Issue

When, in response to a call for papers for the 2008 conference of the Modern Language Association, I began to formulate an argument concerning the relationship between assessment and the corporate university, I assumed that writing such an analysis would be (and I hope I will be forgiven this admittedly masculinist simile) like “shooting fish in a barrel.” My intention was in fact to concentrate on something less obvious: assessment as a labor issue, and the ways the drive toward assessment is both explicitly and implicitly an attack on academic freedom. Imagine my surprise, then, when I read the spring 2008 President’s Column of the MLA Newsletter, with its defense of assessment (Graff 2008).

The Disemboweled University: Online Knowledge and Academic Freedom

Over the past several decades a number of scholars have examined academic freedom. By and large, and understandably, many of those examinations have been situated in social or political frameworks. Notable examples include Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens, The Academic Mind, Ellen Schrecker’s No Ivory Tower, and two early examples, Jane Sanders, Cold War on the Campus, and George Stewart’s compelling first-person account, The Year of the Oath. Many of these works examine events at a single institution (as did Sanders), such as Lionel Lewis’s account of the Lattimore case at the Johns Hopkins University and Charles McCormick’s This Nest of Vipers.

John Ervin Kirkpatrick and the Rulers of American Colleges

At a special meeting on June 2, 1919, Washburn College president Parley Paul Womer assured his disgruntled faculty that he understood their concerns about his administrative style and his direction of the institution. In announcing forthcoming changes, Womer confirmed that the institution was embarking on a new era of faculty and administrative cooperation—and that faculty must be protected “against wilful and capricious action.”

A Tale of Two Conferences: On Power, Identity, and Academic Freedom

This article will examine the extent of the applicability of academic freedom in relation to scholarship on the Israeli-Arab conflict. This will be done by comparing two conferences that took place in the same city at almost the same time, both dealing with issues pertaining to Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East conflict. The article will argue that in reality, academic freedom is relative.

Invigorating the Classroom

In a lengthy two-part, online essay titled “Politicizing the Classroom,” Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, argues that the AAUP’s recent report Ensuring Academic Freedom in Politically Controversial Academic Personnel Decisions is an effort to politicize the university. He advocates, as if it were an alternative, that the university focus on improving the quality of student learning. I disagree with his critique, and particularly his contrived assumption that advocacy and learning are contradictory.

Fundamental Freedom or Fringe Benefit? Rice University and the Administrative History of Tenure, 1935–1963

Despite deep historical roots, tenure as we know it today has a relatively short history. Although the most prominent professors occasionally received special tenure privileges as early as the Middle Ages, tenure as a general practice is a twentieth-century invention.

In 1915, the recently established AAUP published a Declaration of Principles recognizing that the “dignity” of the professorial office required “security of tenure.” But the declaration provided little detail about what exactly “security of tenure” might mean or which policies should be adopted. The meaning of tenure remained unstable until at least 1940, when the AAUP codified its evolving position in a new Statement of Principles. This platform outlined the need for a “probationary period” in tenure-track positions and also specified two goals: (1) “freedom of teaching and research” and (2) “a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive.”

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