A Peer Reviewed Blog
I was recently listening to an episode of The Sunday Edition (a popular weekly radio show on the CBC, Canada’s national broadcaster), on the topic of free speech on university campuses, and was intrigued by the following exchange between host Michael Enright and his guest James Turk, who is director of The Centre of Free Expression at Ryerson University in Toronto (give a listen to their conversation here). Continue reading “Of Trigger Warnings and Petty Things”
Recently, the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Religion released a draft update to its 2006 statement on Academic Freedom and the Teaching of Religion and solicited feedback from members. Given that the members of Culture on the Edge are all scholars of religion, some have opted to offer their feedback to the AAR via this short series of posts on our site. (An index to all the posts in this series can be found here)
Craig Martin
I’m extremely grateful to the AAR for including reference to the AAUP’s statement on collegiality; the requirement of collegiality and civility are potentially directly opposed to academic freedom. However, as Merinda Simmons noted earlier in this series, there appears to be a tension between those comments on collegiality and civility, on the one hand, and the recommendation that we be respectful, sensitive, patient, humble, and generous, on the other. The definitions of the former terms overlap largely with the definitions of the latter. Wikipedia—a good source of information about colloquial uses of words—reports that collegiality *involves respect* toward others. So we are to be respectful to others, but institutions cannot demand that we be respectful (i.e., collegial) toward others? Continue reading “Response to the American Academy of Religion’s Statement on Academic Freedom, Part 3”
Interested in current economic issues facing U.S. higher education and how the federal government now plans to address it…? Read the AAUP’s reply to President Obama’s speech.