Historian Joan Wallach Scott has served on the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure since 1993. She was committee chair from 1999 until this past June, when she became a consultant to the committee. To mark her transition from chair to consultant, "Academe" asked her to participate in an interview about her experience with the committee and her work in behalf of academic freedom. Scott is Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her books include "The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Craftsmen and Political Action in a Nineteenth-Century City" (1974), "Women, Work, and Family" (with Louise Tilly, 1978), "Gender and the Politics of History" (1988),"Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man" (1996), and "Parite: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism" (2005). Her current work focuses on the controversy over Islamic head scarves in French public schools. David Hollinger, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, succeeded Scott as Committee A chair.