04 Culture

Instead, New College professors make land acknowledgements official policy

A recent proposal to end land acknowledgments at faculty business meetings for Arizona State University’s New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Science was rejected before reaching the floor.

Instead, professors approved a resolution to make a Native American land acknowledgement official policy and continue to read it before every faculty meeting.

“My motion to keep meetings non-political and no longer have a required land acknowledgement read at the beginning of every meeting failed. And this is important: they voted to not even vote on it,” Professor Owen Anderson told The College Fix.

Each faculty meeting begins with a statement acknowledging the campus “sits on Native American land,” he said in an interview, adding he believes this conflicts with university bylaws that prohibit using faculty meeting time for political purposes.

“They did not even want to allow it to come to a vote,” he said, describing the decision as censorship. “Faculty meetings should remain about faculty business.”

Eric Rasmusen, a well-known professor of economics at Indiana University, recently said he was denied his application for emeritus status.

Rasmusen retired in 2021, but decided not to apply for emeritus status until last year when the university stopped offering free access to online journal subscriptions for faculty who were retired but not emeritus, Rasmusen wrote recently on his substack.

“If I continue to be denied access, I will accept that,” he told The College Fix in a recent interview. “It isn’t fair, but I can ask friends at Indiana University and elsewhere to look up scholarly articles if I need them.”

Typically, professors who retire in good status are awarded the title “emeritus,” but Rasmusen said he was not. He believes the answer to this question goes back to 2019 and a controversial social media post about men and IQ.