Journal of Academic Freedom News

The AAUP is pleased to announce the appointment of S. Ani Mukherji, assistant professor of American studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and president of his AAUP chapter, as faculty coeditor for volume 12 of the online Journal of Academic Freedom. Mukherji’s scholarship focuses on the themes of racism, empire, and political culture, and he is currently working on a book manuscript, “The Anticolonial Imagination.” He will coedit the volume with Rachel Ida Buff, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, who has served as faculty editor for volumes 9, 10, and 11 of the journal.

Volume 11 was published in September with a selection of articles that focus on the “managed campus” and the prevalence of administrative practices that threaten shared governance and academic freedom—and the lives and livelihoods of faculty, staff, and students on campuses where the COVID-19 crisis has served as a pretext for administrative overreach in decision-making. In her introduction, Buff posits that the managed campus has become a graveyard—not only in the figurative sense, for the academic profession’s most cherished principles, but potentially in the literal sense, as institutions that brought students to campus for in-person classes and residential life this fall immediately reported clusters of COVID-19 cases. The complete volume is available on the AAUP website at https://www.aaup.org/JAF.

A new call for papers for volume 12 of the journal appears on page 56 of the magazine. Titled “Practices of Academic Freedom in Times of Austerity,” the call for papers invites submissions of scholarly articles that consider a range of topics, including academic freedom and freedom struggles, the sanctuary campus movement, pedagogy and access, “the material means of mental production,” libraries and librarians, and internationalist practices. Submissions are due by February 8, 2021.