WASHINGTON, DC—The American Association of University Professors has accepted an invitation from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni to work together to fight campus speech codes.
At a conference on Friday, ACTA president Anne D. Neal publicly urged AAUP president Cary Nelson to consider the well-being of students and join forces with ACTA to rid universities of their restrictive speech codes. Nelson, whose organization has not traditionally collaborated with ACTA, accepted Neal’s invitation, later telling a reporter, “I want to knock out speech codes.”
“The AAUP has now gone on record saying it will work with us to abolish once and for all these pernicious codes,” Neal said. “I look forward to the AAUP’s help in this important fight.”
More than 70 percent of universities have policies that violate their students’ and faculty’s right to freedom of expression, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni is an independent non-profit dedicated to academic freedom, academic quality, and accountability. Since its founding in 1995, ACTA has counseled boards, educated the public and published reports about such issues as donor intent, good governance, historical literacy, core curricula, the free exchange of ideas, and accreditation in higher education.
This guide for trustees reports on the dangerous decline of academic freedom and intellectual diversity on college campuses. The foreword, by Benno Schmidt, chairman of the CUNY Board of Trustees and former president of Yale, comes at a time when duly-invited graduation speakers are made unwelcome, campus speech codes threaten the free exchange of ideas, […]
WASHINGTON, DC—The American Association of University Professors has accepted an invitation from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni to work together to fight campus speech codes. At a conference on Friday, ACTA president Anne D. Neal publicly urged AAUP president Cary Nelson to consider the well-being of students and join forces with ACTA to […]
This report features ten best practices, gleaned from colleges and universities across the country, for promoting the free exchange of ideas in and out of the classroom. Since intellectual diversity is at the core of any true university education, the report commends institutions that have taken action, urges them to keep at it, and exhorts […]
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