BY HANK REICHMAN In June 2014 the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure issued a report, “On Partnerships with Foreign Governments: The Case of Confucius Institutes.” That report warned that Confucius Institutes, then established at some 90 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada, may “function as an arm of the Chinese…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following press statement was issued by a group of graduate students at Columbia University, announcing Academic Freedom Week, a series of panel discussions to be held at Columbia April 9-11. Your silence will not protect you. ― Audre Lorde, The battle for academic freedom at our nation’s universities has been…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is from the website France 24: The dean and a professor at Montpellier University law school were taken into police custody on Wednesday, suspected of taking part in a violent attack on student protesters last week. The two men have since been suspended from their duties. Student protesters occupied…
BY HANK REICHMAN I’m often asked whether the AAUP is as willing to defend the academic freedom and due process rights of right-wing faculty members as we are of liberals and leftists, with whom most of our members tend to be more sympathetic. The answer is that we are and have done so repeatedly throughout…
BY HANK REICHMAN Listening to right-wing Republican whiners, you’d think that America’s college and university campuses have been overrun by thuggish “snowflake” leftists busily drowning out conservative voices in the name of some sort of ideologically purist “political correctness” dismissive of free speech. After U.C. Berkeley failed to find a safe venue for her…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is from the Washington Post: A high school student was suspended for “disrespect” after he called his congressman’s office and told lawmakers — as he recalls it — to “get off their f‑‑‑— asses” and pass gun-control laws. Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.) has defended his staff member for reporting 17-year-old Noah…
BY HANK REICHMAN Two recent U.S. appellate court rulings, from the U.S Courts of Appeal for the Ninth and Fourth Circuits, mark victories for the free speech rights of striking teachers and of students. In the Ninth Circuit case, Eagle Point Education Association/SOBC/OEA; Dave Carrell; Staci Boyer v. Jackson County School District No. 9, decided…
BY HANK REICHMAN Prominent among the cascade of remarkable events in the incredible year of 1968 were a series of student rebellions, the most prominent of which was the uprising at Columbia University in April and May, in which I participated and about which I will have more to post next month. But the first…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday I had the privilege and pleasure of participating in a terrific panel discussion of “Academic Freedom in an Age of Political Polarization” at the Albert Shanker Institute in Washington, D.C. My fellow panelists were Sigal Ben-Porath, Professor of Education, Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and author of…
BY HANK REICHMAN To hear more than a few right-wing politicians and pompous pundits tell it, the greatest problem in American higher education today is that free speech on campus is on life support, especially when it comes to the speech of prominent conservatives and especially at places like the University of.California at Berkeley, home…