BY JOHN K. WILSON Here’s an important point to remember this Halloween: Trump is a narcissistic con man dressed up as a presidential candidate, as I reveal in my book Trump Unveiled: Exposing the Bigoted Billionaire. It’s the scariest costume anyone will ever wear. Inside, he’s as hollow as a Trump piñata that my cats Sunspot and…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On Sept. 21, political science professor Jackie Stevens began teaching her class at Northwestern University. Earlier that week, she didn’t know if that would happen. Stevens had been banned from campus (and prohibited from any contact with students) since July 28, when the administration announced she was a potential threat and…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Earlier today, UC-Berkeley Dean Carla Hesse rescinded her Sept. 13 suspension of the DeCal course on Palestine. But the controversy over her original suspension remains a hotly contested debate. Dean Hesse writes, “I did not request or require any revisions of the content of the course,” a claim questioned by some…
BY JOHN K. WILSON UPDATE: Berkeley rescinded the suspension on Sept. 19. Suspending a course in the middle of a semester is one of the most serious actions a university can take. On Sept. 13, Dean Carla Hesse of the University of California at Berkeley did exactly that to a student-taught DeCal class about Palestine.…
BY JOHN K. WILSON It’s praiseworthy that the University of Chicago has announced to its students a “commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression.” But there is a problem: in this announcement, the University actually calls for limiting freedom of expression, and University of Chicago policies also severely limit free inquiry and student rights. According…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Today, Ann Coulter published her latest book, sure to be another best-seller: In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome. I know, the very stupid subtitle makes no sense, in Latin or English, because Coulter hates immigrants and thinks America is being destroyed by too much “pluribus.” Maybe her publisher thought “Unum…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Inside Higher Ed reports on a recent interview by Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson in which Johnson declares, “we need destructive technology for our higher education system.” This is exactly what Donald Trump wanted to do with his “Trump University.” As I note in my new book, Trump Unveiled: Exposing the Bigoted…
BY JOHN K. WILSON DePaul University has banned conservative pundit Ben Shapiro from speaking on campus to the Young Americans for Freedom student group. Bob Janis, Vice President of Facilities Operations at DePaul, sent an email declaring, “Given the experiences and security concerns that some other schools have had with Ben Shapiro speaking on their…
Peter Wood at Minding the Campus complains about the AAUP’s unanimous vote to censure the University of Missouri Board of Curators because “the AAUP has yet to find anyone to censure over abuses of Title IX.” What the hell does that mean? The AAUP censure list is a list of university administrations. The AAUP has…
The AAUP at its 2016 annual meeting today voted unanimously to censure the administrations of the College of Saint Rose, for the dismissal of 23 tenured and tenure-track professors, and the University of Missouri (Columbia), for the Board’s dismissal of Melissa Click without due process. The members also rejected a proposal to give Committee A authority to…