-
The Basset Affair
The Bassett Affair at Duke University was an important event in the history of academic freedom. In October 1903, Professor John Bassett publicly praised Booker T. Washington and drew attention to the racism and white supremacist behavior of the Democratic party, to the disgust of powerful white Southerners. On December 1, 1903, the entire faculty of the college threatened to resign en masse if the board gave into political pressures and asked Bassett to resign. -
Early Cases involving the AAUP
In 1929, Professors Max Friedrich Meyer and Harmon O. DeGraff were dismissed from their positions at the University of Missouri for advising student Orval Mowrer regarding distribution of a questionnaire which inquired about attitudes towards divorce, "living together", and sex. The university was subsequently censured by the American Association of University Professors in an early case regarding academic freedom due a tenured professor. -
Racism and Academic Freedom
William Shockley was concerned about relatively high reproductive rates among people of African descent, because he believed that genetics doomed black people to be intellectually inferior to white people. He was strongly criticized for this stand, which raised some concerns about whether criticism of unpopular views of racial differences suppressed academic freedom. -
Anti-semitism and Academic Freedom
In 2009 the University of California at Santa Barbara charged William I. Robinson with anti-Semitism after he circulated an email to his class containing more than two dozen photographs of Jewish victims of the Nazis, including those of dead children, juxtaposed with nearly identical images from the Gaza Strip. The charges were dropped after a world wide campaign against the management of the university. -
Grades and Academic Freedom
The University of the Philippines at Diliman affair where controversy erupted after Professor Gerardo A. Agulto was sued by MBA graduate student Chanda R. Shahani for failing him several times in the Strategic Management portion of the Comprehensive Examination. Agulto refused to give a detailed basis for his grades and instead invoked Academic Freedom while Shahani argued in court that Academic Freedom could not be invoked without a rational basis in grading a student. -
"Little Eichmanns"
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, some public statements made by some university faculty were criticized. Most prominent among these were these comments made in January 2005 by University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill. He published an essay in which he asserted that the attack on the United States, while unjustified, were provoked by American foreign policy. On news and talk programs, he was criticized for describing the World Trade Center victims as "little Eichmanns."
