In the fall of 2017, the University of Florida (UF) and the city of Gainesville were part of a coda to a terrible event in recent U.S. history: the violent torch-wielding rally of white supremacists and extreme far-right groups in the college town of Charlottesville, Virginia, that left three people dead and at least 33 injured. These events…

Collective bargaining and faculty governance are sometimes perceived to be in conflict. Faculty members will debate about whether a specific issue--for example, program consolidations or early college/dual enrollment (where high school students earn college credits taking high school classes taught by high school teachers)--falls under governance…

Academic freedom gives professors broad discretion over expressions and interactions in the classroom. Free speech guidelines and First Amendment protections permit students to speak their minds too, but they offer very limited guidance as to how classrooms should operate. While professors should obviously work within free speech parameters in the…

When these inequities began to change in the 20th century, due in part to the sweeping court-ordered integration following Brown v. Board of Education and the simultaneous expansion of public colleges and universities, all citizens began to gain access to educational achievement and, as a result, true access to the American power structure. The…

Despite trends toward greater corporatism and bureaucratization of the academy, some vestiges of shared governance remain, including some level of faculty decision-making in faculty senates or councils. Generalizations about faculty senates are difficult to make because they vary with regard to their level of power and faculty involvement.…

Since the time of the Reagan revolution in the nation's politics--a transformation dedicated to privatizing everything someone could make a profit on--higher education has undergone its own radical transformation. In higher education, within three decades of the Reagan presidency, a corporate model of organization and operation, set up to maximize…

The enormous changes that took place on American campuses during the 1960s not only opened those campuses to new constituencies and new ideas, but also created a powerful conservative movement that sought to reverse those changes. Along with the rising cost of higher education, the right's campaign against the academic reforms of the sixties has…

Traditionally, academic freedom has been understood as an individual right and a negative liberty. As William Tierney and Vincente Lechuga explain, "Academic freedom, although an institutional concept, was vested in the individual professor." The touchstone document on academic freedom, the American Association of University Professor's (AAUP)…

In this article, the author reviews the history of the National Education Association (NEA), which celebrated its 150th year in 2007. Over that time, NEA has been a driving force in education at all levels. The story of NEA is about the building of a unique American school system and the articulation of three levels of education into a unified…

In this article, the author reports that within the few decades following the creation of the National Education Association (NEA), a new expression came into use in the English language: "academic freedom." It was in this period that the modern research university first made its appearance in the United States. Before the last third of…

In 1957, the year the National Education Association (NEA) celebrated its 100th anniversary, the Educational Policies Commission (EPC)--a prestigious group co-sponsored by NEA and the American Association of School Administrators--published a document titled "Higher Education in a Decade of Decision." NEA intended the report to address…

With more than 14 years of preparation, the author thought he knew how to write a syllabus--until he moved to Missouri. Having spent the previous nine years next door in Illinois, first as a graduate student and then as an adjunct (both at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), the author never noticed that his neighbors in the Show Me…

College campuses around the country reacted to the September 11, 2001, terrorist acts with rallies, vigils, discussions, and a wide range of debates about the causes and cures for terrorism. Yet the story told about academia in the media was often quite different. Conservatives claimed that the reaction to 9/11 in academia was another example of…

Alexis Pogorelskin, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth and chair of the History Department, recounts her experience in 2004 after making a controversial comment in her History of the Holocaust and 20th Century Russia class. Her comment was in reference to President Bush making no mention in the 2000 campaign about the…

Throughout the 20th century, academic freedom was a foundational value for the academy in the United States. The concept of academic freedom pertains to the right of faculty to enjoy considerable autonomy in their research and teaching. The assumption that drives academic freedom is that the country benefits when faculty are able to search for…