Ellen Schrecker

The Life and Death of Academic Freedom

The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University. Ellen Schrecker. New York: New Press, 2010.

The Humanities on Life Support

The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of The Humanities. Frank Donoghue. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting our Money and Failing our Kids— And What We Can Do About It. Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus. New York: Times Books, 2010.

The Humanities and the Dream of America. Geoffrey Galt Harpham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. Louis Menand. New York: Norton, 2010.

Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Martha C. Nussbaum. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

One Historian’s Perspective on Academic Freedom and the AAUP

It’s our brand: academic freedom. Whatever else the AAUP does, the defense of academic freedom is what distinguishes it from every other organization. As the American system of higher education has evolved, so, too, has the Association’s mission, but despite embracing collective bargaining and the provision of other services to the professoriate, the AAUP has not abandoned its central concern with protecting the professional autonomy and intellectual integrity of the nation’s faculties.

Ward Churchill at the Dalton Trumbo Fountain: Academic Freedom in the Aftermath of 9/11

How many of the three hundred people who gathered around the Dalton Trumbo Fountain in front of the University of Colorado’s student center on March 3, 2005, to hear Ward Churchill speak understood the irony of the location? Trumbo, a successful screenwriter and Colorado alumnus, had been one of the so-called “Hollywood Ten” who were imprisoned and blacklisted for defying the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. Churchill, like Trumbo an outspoken radical, had just become the target of a nationwide campaign to eject him from his position as a tenured professor of American Indian studies on the Colorado faculty. In a hasty essay, written to explain why the perpetrators of the attack on the World Trade Center would have been so hostile to the United States, he had characterized the 9/11 victims as “little Eichmanns.” That unfortunate phrase, unremarked at the time, emerged with a vengeance three years later in conjunction with a planned speech he was to give at Hamilton College in upstate New York. Catapulted into notoriety by right-wing bloggers and talk-show hosts, Churchill then came under attack by Colorado politicians, who forced the university to investigate and then dismiss its controversial faculty member.

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