The article critically re-interrogates three high profile cases of white racism at South Africa's former "open universities" to highlight the way in which existing debates around academic freedom fail to come to terms with questions of racial injustice after apartheid. The cases covered are the Makgoba affair at Wits, the Mamdani affair…

April 20, 2010, and the days following, provided the world with graphic images of a burning oil rig, a perception that the oil industry and state and federal governments were helpless, and a pervasive sense of the devastation wrought on coastal residents by the rig explosion and the oil spill. The residents of the Gulf Coast soon realized that…

In 2007, a Judicial Commission of Inquiry was established by the Government of Hong Kong to investigate allegations that senior officials had interfered with the academic freedom and institutional autonomy of the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd). It concluded that a former minister had requested the President of that institution to curb…

The purpose of this study was to investigate intellectual diversity on elite public universities in southern California through the perceptual lens of the evangelical undergraduate student. Intellectual diversity has been defined as "the intellectual independence of professors, researchers, and students in the pursuit of knowledge and the…

The demand for qualified information technology professionals remains high despite downturns in the economy. It is imperative to provide students with a curriculum that provides a broad foundation in information technology knowledge, skills, and abilities. Students also need access to specialized technologies and learning materials to develop the…

"The modernizing machine" codes individual bodies, things, and symbols with images from New Public Management, neo-liberal, and Knowledge Economy discourses. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of machines, this article explores how "the modernizing machine" produces neo-liberal modernization of the public sector. Taking…

When California legislators passed the California Charter School Act of 1992, it allowed parents the choice of sending their children to public charter schools, places where teachers would have more autonomy and where schools faced exemptions from state education codes and from collective bargaining contracts. Hope Charter School (a pseudonym;…

In this essay, Liviu Andreescu examines the question of whether a certain category of aprofessional acts by academics (in particular, political speech) deserves protection against academic sanctions under the principle of academic freedom. Andreescu discusses two alternative views of academic freedom (the extensive and the restrictive) providing…

The article distinguishes between the various arguments traditionally offered as justifications for the principle of academic freedom. Four main arguments are identified, three consequentialist in nature (the argument from truth, the democratic argument, the argument from autonomy), and one nonconsequentialist (a variant of the autonomy argument).…

As universities more aggressively embrace corporate values, corporate management practices, corporate labor-relations policies, and corporate money, faculty associations face troubling challenges. The new reality is particularly hostile to academic freedom, and people see that hostility in the actions of corporate funders and university…

The role ideology plays in the university classroom has been debated since the publication of Buckley's "God and Man at Yale" (1951). The "Chronicle of Higher Education's" Special Report (2004) found that more than half of United States citizens polled felt that U.S. colleges and universities improperly introduce a liberal…

Following the dismissal of a Canadian professor over disputed grading practices, Hill produced his triangle model of competing interests of academics, administrators and students. In the UK, academic freedom in relation to grading is increasingly constrained reflecting more assertive institutional management supervising over-burdened academic…

Rigid foci on accountability, accreditation, and customer service pose significant challenges for literacy educators today. The most consequential identified as the snuffing out of scholastic innovation and erosion of academic freedom. This article recounts a recent experience that occurred while the author prepared a lesson for an undergraduate…

Lange (1988) has defined "articulation" as "the interrelationship and continuity of contents, curriculum, instruction, and evaluation with programs which focus on the progress of student in learning to both comprehend and communicate in a second language" (p. 16-17). It is the continuity of one course to the next without…

A major challenge facing higher education is balancing two competing discourses. One sees higher education as a place of learning and teaching in academic freedom, a place to enable staff and students to research and learn without restrictions, a place in which to be able to critique the status quo. The other discourse is rooted in neo-liberalism.…