Academic Trials

A disturbing, but informative, reading about the nature and threats of litigation in higher education comes from Amy Gajda in her The Trials of Academe: The New Era of Campus Litigation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Building on the notion that as universities become more complex and adopt the corporate model, they become more susceptible to lawsuits and the courts being more open to hearing cases they would not have considered in the past. Gajda discusses anti-discrimination law, free-speech issues, intellectual property, privacy, academic defamation, tort law, and contracts. This is a good, clear assessment of the topic.