The Colorado affiliate of the American Association of University Professors has accused its state’s flagship university of hostility to academic freedom and recommends that scholars accept employment at the school only as a “last resort.” The charge stems in part from the University of Colorado-Boulder’s refusal to renew the 2007 contract of Phil Mitchell, an adjunct history professor at CU for more than two decades whose Christianity and political conservatism alienated him from colleagues.
“Mitchell was terminated for exercising his best professional judgment in his classroom,” the report of the Colorado Conference of the AAUP determined. “Furthermore, his rights to free expression were not recognized.” The organization points out that the University of Colorado’s published policy on academic freedom doesn’t differentiate between tenured and untenured professors.
The university had initially fired Mitchell in 2005, but rescinded the termination after a media uproar. In an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor that year, Mitchell explained that “several department chairs had said that my teaching is not up to the standards of the department and that I am too overtly Christian in the classroom.” Curiously, the AAUP found that Mitchell had won more teaching awards than the entire faculty of the special program in which he had taught and earned the highest student evaluations of any professor in the history department despite grading practices that placed him among the tougher half of history professors. The report, authored by AAUP officers and CU academics Don Eron and Suzanne Hudson, explains that “there is no evidence in [Mitchell’s] file that he was attempting to convert students to Christianity or to political conservatism, or forcing his opinions on them.”
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