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| Formation | March 2021 |
|---|---|
| Type | 501(c)3 organization |
| 85-3780742 | |
The Academic Freedom Alliance(AFA) is a nonprofit organization formed by college educators to defend free expression. The mission of the organization is to challenge university administrations and provide legal help to professors who face disciplinary action over controversial speech or activities. [1] It was founded by Keith Whittington, Cornel West, Robert George, Jeannie Suk Gersen, and Nadine Strossen. [2]
The organization provides legal support for professors involved in free speech controversies. It challenges university administrations and external entities on behalf of the academicians to support academic freedom and civil debate on a range of issues. [3] Its actions have defended multiple professors including preventing a professor from getting fired from a university. [4]
The Academic Freedom Alliance was founded in March 2021 by a group of Princeton University faculty along with 200 other founding members in the United States. [5] As of 2021, the organization has 400 members. [6]
In March 2022, the Academic Freedom Alliance sent a letter to the administration of Princeton University calling on it to remove criticism of a faculty member's speech from the webpage of the Carl Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding. [7] Writing for the Academe Blog of the American Association of University Professors, John K. Wilson stated that advocating for such restrictions on criticism of faculty by university staff and centers on all university webpages represents an "untenable" and "hypocritical standard" that would lead to "censorship on a breathtaking scale." [8] Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber declined to remove the controversial comment from the webpage of Carl Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding. [9]
Stanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. Fish has previously served as the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law at Florida International University and is dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a German-American academic associated with Austrian School economics, anarcho-capitalism, right-wing libertarianism, and opposition to democracy. He is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), senior fellow of the Mises Institute think tank, and the founder and president of the Property and Freedom Society.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), formerly called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit civil liberties group founded in 1999 with the mission of protecting freedom of speech on college campuses in the United States. FIRE changed its name in June 2022, when it broadened its focus from colleges to freedom of speech throughout American society.
Nadine Strossen is an American legal scholar and civil liberties activist who served as the president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1991 to 2008. A liberal feminist, she was the first woman to lead the ACLU. A professor at New York Law School, Strossen is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and other professional organizations.
Academic freedom is the right of a teacher to instruct and the right of a student to learn in an academic setting unhampered by outside interference. It may also include the right of academics to engage in social and political criticism.
Robert Peter George is an American legal scholar, political philosopher, and public intellectual who serves as the sixth McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He lectures on constitutional interpretation, civil liberties, philosophy of law, and political philosophy.
Tenure is a type of academic appointment that protects its holder from being fired or laid off except for cause, or under extraordinary circumstances such as financial exigency or program discontinuation. Academic tenure originated in the United States in the early 20th century, and several other countries have since adopted it. Tenure is a means of defending the principle of academic freedom, which holds that it benefits society in the long run if academics are free to hold and espouse a variety of views, even if the views are unpopular or controversial.
Cary Nelson, is an American professor emeritus of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was president of the American Association of University Professors between 2006 and 2012.
The AMCHA Initiative is a non-partisan organization aiming to combat antisemitism on campuses through investigation, documentation, and education in order to protect Jewish students from assault and fear. AMCHA was founded in 2012 by University of California Santa Cruz lecturer Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and University of California Los Angeles Professor Emeritus Leila Beckwith. The term Amcha is Hebrew for "your people" or "your nation."
Steven Salaita is an American scholar, author and public speaker. He became the center of a controversy when the University of Illinois did not hire him as a professor of American Indian Studies following objections to a series of tweets critical of Israel's bombardment of Gaza in 2014. He also experienced similar controversy during the hiring process at the American University of Beirut in 2016.
Michael Scott Adams was an American conservative political columnist, writer and professor of criminology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He became known for his outspoken opinions, frequently attracting controversy. When he did not receive a promotion to full professor, he filed a lawsuit against the university and eventually won. After many conflicts with students and national coverage of his controversial social media and blog posts, public pressure to have him removed grew and he was eventually asked to retire. Twenty-one days after reaching a retirement settlement with the university, he was found dead in his home with a gunshot wound to the head.
The Steven Salaita hiring controversy was a 2010s controversy about an American professor who was un-hired by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign following a campaign by pro-Israel students, faculty and donors who contended that his tweets protesting Israel's bombardment of Gaza were antisemitic. The un-hiring sparked a debate about academic freedom in relation to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, social media, and the influence of pro-Israel lobby groups on American universities. The professor who was denied the job successfully litigated against the university and was awarded a settlement of $875,000, while the university's Chancellor Phyllis Wise resigned.
George Ciccariello-Maher, also known as Geo Maher, is an American political scientist who was an associate professor of politics and global studies at Drexel University.
Heterodox Academy (HxA) is a nonprofit advocacy group of academics working to counteract what they see as a lack of viewpoint diversity on college campuses. The organization was founded in 2015 by Jonathan Haidt, Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, and Chris Martin, who each cited a lack of politically conservative viewpoints in their academic disciplines. As of 2023, the organization had approximately 5,000 members in both faculty and non-faculty positions.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an American academic, writer, and activist. She is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016). For this book, Taylor received the 2016 Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book from the Lannan Foundation. She is a co-publisher of Hammer & Hope, an online magazine that began in 2023.
Bruce Gilley is a Canadian–American professor of political science and director of the PhD program in Public Affairs and Policy at the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University. He is the founder and president of the Oregon Association of Scholars, member of the Heterodox Academy and founding signatory of the Oregon Academic Faculty Pledge on Freedom. Gilley gained international acclaim but also a storm of criticism for his highly controversial peer-reviewed article "The Case for Colonialism," published in an advance online edition of the scientific journal Third World Quarterly in 2017. Fifteen members of the journal's board resigned over Gilley's article.
Dorian Schuyler Abbot is an American geophysicist. He is a professor at the University of Chicago.
Keith E. Whittington is an American political scientist and legal scholar. He has been the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University since 2006. In July 2024, he joined the Yale Law School faculty. Whittington's research focuses on American constitutionalism, American political and constitutional history, judicial politics, the presidency, and free speech and the law.
Joshua Timothy Katz is an American linguist and classicist who was the Cotsen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University until May 2022. He is a scholar on the languages, literatures, and cultures of ancient and medieval history. Currently, he is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi is a Palestinian-born American scholar, activist, educator, editor, and an academic director. She is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, Race and Resistance Studies, and the founding Director of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED) at San Francisco State University (SFSU). Colleen Flaherty of Inside Higher Education described her as "a controversial figure in an already controversial field".