Academic Freedom

Academic Freedom and Tenure: Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, A Supplementary Report on a Censured Administration

This supplementary report raises questions about the dismissal of professor Teresa Buchanan from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, which has been on the AAUP’s list of censured administrations since 2012. Professor Buchanan, a specialist in early childhood education with an unblemished eighteen-year performance record, was being evaluated for promotion to full professor when a district school superintendent and an LSU student filed complaints against her for occasional use of profanity and bawdy language. Her dean immediately suspended her from teaching, and eventually, despite a faculty hearing committee's unanimous recommendation against dismissal, the LSU board of supervisors accepted the administration's recommendation that she be dismissed. The faculty senate at LSU also condemned the administration's actions, and, represented by attorneys from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Professor Buchanan has filed a lawsuit against the university, for which the AAUP Foundation has provided financial assistance.

A Journalist's View of the Assault on Public Education

As the united voice of the scholars and teachers at our nation’s colleges and universities, the AAUP has never been more needed than it is today and more crucial to the fierce debate raging across the land, from the poorest public school districts to the most elite private universities, over what American education will look like in the twenty-first century and what role the faculty, the workforce of the education industry, will play.

Palestinian Universities and Everyday Life under Occupation

On my last night in the old city of Jerusalem, I enter through the Flower’s Gate and walk through a busy market, past boys chasing each other on narrow streets, clusters of old men visiting in shop doorways, women leaning out of upper windows. The fading afternoon light amplifies the social relations of a neighborhood bound by intimate conversation and cheerful laughter. Just before I reach the Muslim cemetery, however, teenagers loitering a block away from the Lion’s Gate fling an empty glass bottle in front of a car backing out of a narrow driveway.

Why Academic Politics Are So Vicious

Twenty years have passed since I taught my first day of classes as a beginning assistant professor at Middle Tennessee State University. To be honest, these days I often find myself bored as well as exhausted. But I do not seek a life elsewhere. It is the fact that I can spread ideas that keeps me faithful to what I do.

Does Academic Freedom Have a Future?

Prognostications about the future of academic freedom will be informed best by the lessons of its past. And if there is any lesson to be learned from the AAUP’s first century, it is that academic freedom can never be taken for granted. While academic freedom is one of the foundations of greatness in the American higher education system, it has always been—and always will be—contested and vulnerable. Academic freedom must be fought for repeatedly, and there will be no final victory in the struggle.

The AAUP in the Digital Universe(ity)

The universe of the Internet is changing both the AAUP and the university—and it will continue to do so. The AAUP, an organization that once could focus primarily on matters of particular concern to the faculty, now finds that it must react to a much wider range of issues and address a wider population. Universities that once were able to solve many of their problems out of public sight now find that almost everything they do is subject to comment. The privilege of privacy has disappeared—for all of us.

The Changing Media and Academic Freedom

The media have been both enemies and allies of faculty in the fight for academic freedom during the past century.

The AAUP's 1915 Declaration of Principles: Conservative and Radical, Visionary and Myopic

Understanding the 1915 Declaration helps illuminate some of the current debates about academic freedom (such as the question of whether statements related to academic work are protected as extramural utterances).

Debating Academic Freedom in India

The authors of this article put forward what academic freedom is not and then argue how academic freedom gets defined in the context of twenty-first-century India.

A Review of Academic Freedom in African Universities through the Prism of the 1997 ILO/UNESCO Recommendation

This essay assesses the compliance of African universities with the ILO/UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Status of Higher-Education Teaching Personnel, based on its four indicators: institutional autonomy, individual rights and freedoms, institutional self-governance, and tenure.

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