The AAUP—the American Association of University Professors—held its annual Conference on the State of Higher Education at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. June 10-14. A few subway stops away, the Heartland Institute held its tenth International Conference on Climate Change at the Washington Court Hotel, June 11-12. I suspect that I am the only person to attend both.
Both events dealt with the issues of academic and intellectual freedom. Both focused on current threats to such freedoms. Both pictured a world in which politically-motivated foes of free expression are using their wealth and power to silence legitimate dissent.
But, of course, these events were polar opposites. The AAUP was gearing up to pass a resolution to censure the University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign for rescinding its offer of an academic appointment to Steven Salaita. The Heartland Institute was championing the work of Dr. Willie Soon, the solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who came under attack by Greenpeace and the New York Times after he published an important article in Science Bulletin.
Both controversies have received ample coverage, though I think it is quite possible, even likely, that people who know a lot about one may not know a lot about the other. A primer:
Steven Salaita. He was a tenured associate professor of English at Virginia Tech who in October 2013 received an offer for a tenured position in the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, contingent on the board of trustees’ approval. On August 1, 2014, the university’s vice president of academic affairs and its chancellor wrote to Salaita informing him that they were not proceeding with the appointment. Salaita appealed to the trustees who on September 10, 2014, voted 8 to 1 not to reconsider his appointment. Salaita soon after filed a lawsuit which is on-going.