Academic freedom
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San Jose State professor fired after engaging in pro-Palestinian protests reinstated by arbitrator’s decision
An interesting case. It seems like the right decision: firing a tenured professor was wildly disproportionate to the offense, given the professor’s strong record. It was no doubt crucial that the San Jose State faculty is unionized.
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Yale AAUP Chapter lawyers up as it threatens to take legal action if Yale Admin cuts a deal with Trump
CHE story here. It’s obviously true that “deals” with a criminal like Trump are almost never reliable, but, contrary to what the article suggests, there is no “academic freedom” right to engage in unlawful discrimination in admissions. The only question here is factual: does Yale continue to discriminate against white and Asian applicants? If so,…
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Texas AAUP sues Texas Tech over its clearly unlawful attemps to control course content and faculty speech
I trust the federal courts will put a stop to this mischief. I hope they get to depose Gauleiter Creighton! (Earlier coverage.)
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U of Tennessee pays $1.9 million to assistant professor wrongfully fired…
…for exercising her First Amendment rights after the murder of Charlie Kirk. She did not, however, get her job back, but my guess she will walk away with more than one million of the settlement. Hopefully these kinds of payouts will teach spineless administrators something the next time the exercise of First Amendment rights offends…
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An English professor responds to the Boghossian Report
Jonathan Kramnick, a philosophically-minded English professor at Yale, has an interesting response to the “Boghossian Report” which is worth reading. Professor Kramnick agrees with the Report that, “When scholarship becomes subordinated to extra-scholarly ends — when a field decides in advance what its findings must be and bends its methods accordingly — it ceases to…
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A weak response to the “Boghossian Report” by the AAUP chapters at Wash U/St. Louis and Vanderbilt (whose Chancellors comissioned the report)
The response is here. It states that, Historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists are singled out for caricature while the authors fail to acknowledge their own public biases against scholarship performed in the name of social justice. No evidence is adduced that scholars in these fields were caricatured, so we are left wondering why we should…
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How is the New School selecting tenured faculty for termination…
…given its budget crisis? As this petition notes (I have signed it), only one tenured economics professor has been fired, and he was an outspoken critic of the administration and its financial mismanagement. That is, to put it gently, highly suspicious, and I hope Professor Reddy takes legal action. There is another petition in support…
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The war on academic freedom at Texas Tech, another ongoing saga
What a disaster: About half of Texas Tech University faculty members who responded to a recent survey said they’ve changed their course content — without being asked — to comply with policies restricting how they can teach about race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Another quarter reported they’d done so at administrators’ request, and…
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Abuse of Title VI at Penn to target “anti-semitism”
An account here. We have noted the weaponization of Title VI (which began with Biden!) in the past.
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Federal judge orders Texas State to continue paying philosophy professor it wrongfully fired…
….in violation of his First Amendment rights. Thank goodness for judges, and FIRE, which retained the local lawyers representing Professor Robinson.
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The American Bar Association needs to investigate Texas Tech Law School for violating the First Amendment rights of a student
A Texas Tech Law alum writes: Texas Tech, as you might know, is in the forefront of demolishing any semblance of academic freedom. Their new system Chancellor (Brandon Creighton) is the former state legislator who authored SB17, the legislation that outlawed DEI, requires Regent review of syllabi, and loosens tenure protections. A Texas Tech School…
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Meanwhile, faculty and students at Ghent are still conspiring to get Cofnas fired
This document was sent out to encourage philosophers to file complaints about the fact that Dr. Cofnas was appointed to a post-doc: Note that it evens supplies text to use in filing a complaint! Let me observe that this is not only an attack on Dr. Cofnas’s academic freedom, but also on the academic freedom…
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Cambridge’s violation of the academic freedom rights of Nathan Cofnas (and its own free speech policies)
Dr. Cofnas reviews the gory details. It’s particularly shocking that Cambridge Philosophy hired a not very competent lawyer to review the academic merits of his research rather than scholars in his field: that would be a fatal due process violation in the U.S. under AAUP standards. (Earlier coverage here and here.)
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Another casualty of the Texas war on academic freedom
Philosopher Christy Mag Uidhir, whose earlier objections to the new intrusive policies we noted, writes: I have notified the University of Houston that I will be resigning my position as Professor of Philosophy effective June 1st, 2026. Not sure what I’ll be doing next, but I do know that whatever it is, I won’t be…
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The Republican war on academic freedom and freedom of expression: a survey of faculty
From CHE: Academic researchers’ self-censorship occurred across nearly all disciplines, the survey found. Twenty-nine percent of respondents who lived in states with a [prohibition on] “divisive concepts” law said they had altered their research, and 10 percent said they were looking for a job in a different state because of the political climate. Researchers in…
[…] 剛剛瀏覽了一下Brian Leiter的部落格，他在6月29日整理了英美哲學家的新單位，其中Mark Murphy從喬治城大學到Notre Dame，而Seth Lazar到Johns Hopkins大學去。提供大家參考。Leiter的轉載可以參考此處！ […]