Academic Freedom

A draft statement released in November by the AAUP argues that requiring faculty members to sign confidentiality agreements as a condition of serving on university committees is in most cases inconsistent with widely accepted standards of shared governance and with the concept of serving as a faculty representative. This argument does not apply to those serving on promotion and tenure committees and similar bodies, where faculty members do not serve as representatives but instead are elected to exercise their own professional judgment in interpreting and applying relevant criteria.

Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge by Marjorie Heins. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

In 1990, I wrote in Academe about higher education in Palestine, in particular the difficulties of operating under military occupation. Then, in 2004, I updated the information, noting how much more difficult communication had become but mentioning some hopeful developments in teaching and research. I wish that I could now write a more optimistic piece. The West Bank and Gaza are still under varying degrees of occupation, as shown to some extent by the map below. Traveling even short distances can be a daily trauma for faculty members and students.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently issued an important decision that vigorously affirms First Amendment protections for academic speech by faculty members. Demers v. Austin arose when Washington State University disciplined professor David Demers after he distributed a pamphlet that made proposals to change the direction and focus of the Murrow School of Communications. Demers sued the university, alleging that the university’s actions violated his First Amendment rights. The trial court applied the Supreme Court’s analysis in the 2006 Garcetti v.