Media Coverage

On the Ground in Kansas: Social Media, Academic Freedom, and the Fight for Higher Education

This essay explores the Kansas Board of Regents’ recently implemented rules addressing “Improper Use of Social Media” and faculty responses to this policy. It focuses on the moderate response that has predominated and the debates about the relationship between the First Amendment and academic freedom.

In Response to Ellen Schrecker’s “Ward Churchill at the Dalton Trumbo Fountain”: An Introduction to the Colorado Conference of the AAUP’s Report on the Termination of Ward Churchill

Prominently featured in the inaugural issue of the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom (JAF) was an article by historian cum AAUP Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure member Ellen Schrecker titled “Ward Churchill at the Dalton Trumbo Fountain,” purportedly using my much-publicized case at the University of Colorado, Boulder (UCB) as a means of illuminating the more generalized repression of critical scholarship in the United States since September 2001. Having received a heads-up that the article would be appearing, I must admit that I’d been awaiting its publication with considerable eagerness. This was so, both because I hoped its release might reflect a change for the better in my theretofore negative experience with the AAUP’s national office, and because I held—in fact, still hold—Schrecker’s work concerning the impact of McCarthyism on the academy in highest esteem.She of all people, I imagined, couldbe relied upon not only to recount what had transpired at UCB in a fair and accurate manner but to properly contextualize it.

Student Journalism Under Fire

It has become routine for student journalists and their advisers to experience hostility that threatens their ability to practice journalism and sometimes threatens their careers or the survival of their publications, says a report issued in December by the AAUP, the College Media Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the Student Press Law Center. The report, titled Threats to the Independence of Student Media, examines current threats and expands upon the basic principles of a free student press previously endorsed by these and other organizations.

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