Journal of Academic Freedom Explores Landscapes of Power

POSTED BY THE AAUP

We are pleased to announce the publication of volume 14 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. Our call for papers, “Landscapes of Power and Academic Freedom,” invited scholarly articles investigating the links between social power and the historical development and contemporary status of academic freedom.

Seeking submissions that would build on volume 13’s focus on legislative interference—particularly with respect to teaching about the history of racism in the United States—we underscored the need to understand the forces intent on undermining academic freedom and the impact such attacks would have on democracy as we know it. Contributions selected for this year’s volume document radical changes to the educational landscape and consider the broad implications of such changes, across this country and others. The volume’s fifteen articles explore recurring tensions between landscapes of social power rooted in principles of “power with others” through inclusion and the pursuit of the common good versus those rooted in “power over others” through authoritarian forms of coercion and exclusion. Academic freedom is essential not only to individual academics and their activities as teachers, researchers, and citizens but also to the collective enterprise of higher education as a form of “power with others.”

You can access the complete volume at https://www.aaup.org/volume-14 or click on titles in the table of contents below. Please also read the call for papers for next year’s volume, “Truth-Telling versus Propaganda—Exposing the Rift.” Submissions are due by March 5, 2024.

—Michael Dreiling and Pedro García-Caro, Faculty Coeditors

The Journal of Academic Freedom is supported by funding from the AAUP Foundation.

Table of Contentsstark, hilly landscape with a row of wind turbines in front of a sunset

Editors’ Introduction: Landscapes of Power and Academic Freedom
By Michael Dreiling and Pedro García-Caro

Defense against the Dark Arts: Academic Freedom Meets the Antiwoke Crusade
By Richard Hanley

Bad Precedent: The Trump-Pence Administration’s Executive Order 13950 as Pretext for Republican Attacks on Academic Freedom
By Logan Johnson

All Education Is Political: Critical Race Theory and the Killing of Black Academic Freedom
By J. R. Caldwell Jr.

Chicana/os in the Academic Culture: Still Struggling for Inclusion and Voice
By Adalberto Aguirre Jr. and Rubén O. Martinez

Autocratic Legalism and the Threat to Academic Freedom: Are We Learning the Right Lessons from Europe?
By Marc Weinstein and Joy Blanchard

A Threat to Democracy: Florida’s Agenda to Dismantle Public Higher Education
By Dilys Schoorman and Rosanna Gatens

When Truth Hurts: Reactions to the Piloted AP African American Studies Program
By Ricardo Phipps

H.B. 1006 and H.B. 1607: The Eighty-Eighth Texas Legislature’s Attack on Academic Freedom in Texas
By Tabitha S. M. Morton

The Teaching of the “Dirty Past” in the United States and Spain: A Comparative Analysis
By Carmen Moreno-Nuño

Bad Readers
By Helen Kapstein

Escape from Academic Freedom
By Louis Edgar Esparza

No Confidence in the CSU
By Christina M. Smith

Accreditation, Academic Freedom, and Institutional Autonomy: Historical Precedents and Modern Imperatives
By Timothy Reese Cain

Who Has the Final Say? Academic Freedom, Censorship, and Governance in Higher Education
By Carol J. Batker and Jennifer E. Turpin

Space to Think: Defending “Thought-Labor” as Essential to Academic Freedom
By Michael Davis, Margaret Cotter-Lynch, and Kyle Lincoln