BY JENNIFER RUTH “Will You Take the Stand?” ask the Florida college students staging a walkout at noon today. In an online pledge form, they write, The DeSantis Administration is proposing to outlaw all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives at Florida Colleges and Universities. He has displayed a pattern of behavior in which he Hijacks…
BY JENNIFER RUTH Nobody has a crystal ball but given the president-elect’s words and acts during the campaign—not to mention his seedy experiment in higher education—we would be fools not to expect an attack on the liberal institutions of shared governance and academic freedom. We need to look at what has happened to the sanctity of…
BY JENNIFER RUTH The rejection of the College Board’s AP course in African American Studies is only the latest in a series of disturbing news relating to education coming out of Florida. Other examples include the January 18 statement from the presidents of the twenty-eight institutions in the Florida College System declaring they will not…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In April 2019, a friend and I visited the grave of Lin Zhao in Suzhou, China to pay respect to one of history’s bravest defenders of intellectual freedom. Scanning a hill dotted with around 300 gravestones, we saw three CCTV cameras trained on one spot and climbed to it. My friend snapped…
BY JENNIFER RUTH I don’t think I need to rehearse the incident and its very unjust consequences for one adjunct professor. It’s all over the news, both in higher ed and mainstream outlets. “Our response to the classroom event does not disregard or minimize the importance of academic freedom,” said Hamline University president Fayneese Miller…
BY JENNIFER RUTH “Where woke goes to die.” Let’s call this phrase what it is: fascist propaganda. In “The Collapse of Radical Reconstruction,” the first episode of Princeton professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s podcast “History is Us,” Le Moyne College professor Douglas Egerton says, “Reconstruction did not fail. Reconstruction was killed.” What does “where woke…
BY JENNIFER RUTH I was happy on Thursday to see the AAUP statement — reproduced below — on the University of Idaho’s attempt to enforce “neutrality” on the topic of abortion among its faculty when they are in the classroom. I was stunned when I read about the University of Idaho administration’s “guidance” to maintain…
BY JENNIFER RUTH It’s worth highlighting an AAUP toolkit from the past in light of these two alarming articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education — “Public University Curricula are Government Speech, Florida Says” and “It’s Not Clear Whether Public-College Professors have First Amendment Rights When They’re Teaching”: The AAUP Action Plan for Protecting an…
BY JENNIFER RUTH Last week, I interviewed Professor Shiu Wen-tang (許文堂), President of the Taiwan Association of University Professors. Given the attention in America paid to US Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit and the aftermath (namely, Chinese military aggression), it seemed an apt time to introduce readers to the faculty organization in Taiwan dedicated to Taiwan’s…
BY JENNIFER RUTH China’s retaliation for Nancy Pelosi’s trip continued last week, as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) launched a second wave of live fire drills around Taiwan. “China has threatened Taiwan militarily for years, and it continues to upgrade its efforts,” Taiwan’s foreign minister Joseph Wu said at a press conference on August 9th.…