Corey Robin

Tag: academic freedom

Yale faculty defend academic freedom—sort of

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According to the Yale Daily News, nearly 900 faculty at Yale have signed a letter calling on the president and provost to protect academic freedom at Yale. It’s a strong letter, organized by the faculty senate and a local chapter of the AAUP, but I couldn’t help noticing a glaring omission in it. The letter identifies four threats to academic freedom at Yale (and calls upon the university to take two affirmative steps for academic freedom), but all four of the threats come solely, in the letter’s formulation, from the government. This seems like an odd position, to me, because since Trump’s second ascension to power, the most severe violation of academic freedom at Yale has come from the University […]

But for the boycott there would be academic freedom

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When people say that the ASA boycott violates academic freedom they seem to assume that academic freedom in Israel/Palestine exists. But for the boycott, goes the argument, there would be academic freedom. But as this fact sheet by the Institute for Middle East Understanding suggests, that is not the case for Palestinians. One of our most minimal definitions of any kind of freedom, academic or otherwise, is the absence of external impediments to the physical movement of our bodies. What Palestinian students and scholars routinely face is the presence of external impediments to the physical movement of their bodies. Here are some highlights: Due to Israeli restrictions imposed in cooperation with the government of Egypt, it is extremely difficult for […]