Freedom to Teach in the Classroom
Date: Thursday, September 14, 2017, Common Hour, Dangremond Family Commons
Joerg Tiede, Senior Program Officer in the Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance at the American Association of University Professors Co-sponsored with the Trinity College AAUP Chapter.
The freedom to teach is a constitutive element of academic freedom that extends from such fundamental issues as the choice of course materials, preparation of the syllabus, and the conduct of lectures to the assignment of grades. This talk will address a broad range of issues, such as recent discussions of trigger warnings, the relationship between individual academic freedom in the classroom and the faculty’s responsibility for the curriculum, and long-standing questions about faculty who intrude into the classroom material not related to their subject. This presentation will provide an overview of the conception of academic freedom as a professional prerogative of faculty members, as well as its scope and limits in the classroom.