The UCSF Academic Senate Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF) is pleased to announce a lecture by Professor Henry Reichman on "Academic Freedom: Its Meaning, Its Crisis, and How to Defend It" on April 2, 2024, from 4 pm to 5 pm followed by a reception. Dr. Reichman is a Professor Emeritus of History at California State University, East Bay. He has significantly contributed to the discourse on academic freedom through his books “The Future of Academic Freedom" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), which won the American Library Association's prestigious Eli M. Oboler Award for intellectual freedom in 2020, and "Understanding Academic Freedom” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), a second edition of which is in preparation. Professor Reichman is a former vice-president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and served as chair of AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2012 to 2021, where he was pivotal in advocating for shared governance and the rights of faculty members across institutions. Most recently he co-chaired the AAUP's special investigation of "Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System" (https://www.aaup.org/file/AAUP_Florida_final.pdf). He posts regularly on higher education issues at the AAUP's Academe blog (academeblog.org), of which he is a co-editor. Please join us as Professor Reichman will discuss what defines academic freedom, how it both resembles and differs from rights to free speech, and, in particular, how it applies to medical schools, with discussion of a recent court decision in Massachusetts that recognized the importance of tenure's guarantee of "economic security" to the protection of academic freedom. He will also discuss what he has labeled the current "crisis of academic freedom" and offer suggestions on how we might best defend and extend its protections. Hope to see you there!

RSVP: please email Sophia Root to RSVP for the event (Sophia.Root@ucsf.edu)

Location: Byers Auditorium (600 16th Street, San Francisco, California 94158) & Zoom: https://ucsf.zoom.us/j/98192164603?pwd=N3Q0VzByOStGUjcrMzMyNWJOR3RVUT09

UCSF Academic Senate: https://senate.ucsf.edu/

If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to CAF senate analysts Sophia Root (Sophia.Root@ucsf.edu) and Kirstin McRae (Kirstin.Mcrae@ucsf.edu). Host: Steven Altschuler.