Academic Freedom

Institutionalized Attacks on Academic Freedom: The Impact of Mandates by State Departments of Education and National Accreditation Agencies on Academic Freedom

Academic freedom in education has always been and continues to be a critical and irreplaceable component in fostering a participatory democracy and a critically engaged citizenry. In fact, when comparing the education systems of democratic and totalitarian societies throughout history, nothing contrasts more consistently than attitudes and practices toward intellectual freedom and control over what is taught in schools. Anton Makarenko (1955) wrote, “It was clear to me that details of human personality and behavior could be made from dies, simply stamped out en masse” (p.165). It’s safe to say that Makarenko was a true believer in standardized education.

 

The Corporatization of American Higher Education: Merit Pay Trumps Academic Freedom OR More Discretionary Power for Administrators over Faculty: You’re Kidding Me, Right?

I decided to include the irreverent alternative title to this essay because, when I was first presented by our faculty union with the proposal for increased reliance on merit pay for pay raises, my initial response remains my most persistent thought on the subject: “You’re kidding me, right?” I have discovered that neither my administration nor my union leaders were kidding, yet the joke remains on me and the rest of my colleagues who are now subjected to the wonders of the grand idea and the realities of the perverse execution of the concept of merit pay in the university.

“I Have No Idea What You Do Out Here”: Community Colleges, Academic Freedom, and the University as Global Marketplace

We are professors of history and English, respectively, at Kingsborough Community College, located in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn. Founded in 1963 during a rapid nationwide expansion of community colleges, Kingsborough, which serves some thirty thousand students a year, is one of six two-year institutions that are part of the City University of New York, the nation’s third-largest university system. Kingsborough is perched on Brooklyn’s Atlantic edge, on the site of a former merchant marine facility.

Narrowing Academic Freedom, Discriminating against Israeli Nationals: A Response to the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom, Volume 4

A recent round table of essays published in the Journal of Academic Freedom, an online publication of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), sought to bolster the case for an academic boycott of Israeli universities and scholars, seeking thereby to turn an organization long committed to values of academic freedom and fairness against those same values. Six of nine essays in the issue offered arguments for an academic boycott, taking stands against academic freedom and non-discrimination toward Israeli nationals. Cary Nelson, a former AAUP pre

Boycotts, Bias and Politics in the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Response to the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom, Volume 4

Academic boycotts are, by their very nature, blunt weapons to be used with extreme caution. When implemented, they silence the open exchange of knowledge, and promote the antithesis of academic freedom. Such extreme measures cannot be justified when casually invoked as part of a cynical political campaign to promote one side in a complex ethno-national or religious dispute.

Editor's Introduction - Volume 1

With this issue we introduce a new online project: the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom. Scholarship on academic freedom—and on its relation to shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining—is typically scattered across a wide range of disciplines. People who want to keep up with the field thus face a difficult task. Moreover, there is no one place to track the developing international discussion about academic freedom and its collateral issues.

Can the Adjunct Speak?

In an article my colleague Jan Clausen and I wrote in 2013 for the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom, we outlined a series of academic “unfreedoms” that cascade from the core reality of academia today: that faculties almost everywhere are largely composed of workers serving on contingent and thus precarious appointments. We pointed out the potential for direct censorship of adjunct faculty speech in the classroom through faculty hiring and firing decisions made by individual department chairs.

Editor's Introduction - Volume 3

With this, the third annual issue of the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom, we make good for the first time on our pledge to publish essays that carry on a debate with one another. The 2011 volume of JAF opened with two essays highly critical of the pedagogy, philosophy, and politics of the growing assessment and accountability movement—John Champagne’s “Teaching in the Corporate University: Assessment as a Labor Issue” and John W.

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