BY JOHN K. WILSON A new Gallup survey released today, sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Newseum Institute, shows that college students support free speech and open debate more than other adults in America, but they often make exceptions to their support for 1st Amendment rights. In the survey’s…
Marquette University yesterday announced the punishment of John McAdams for his crime of publicly criticizing a graduate student teacher’s pedagogy on his blog: He will be suspended (and banned) from campus until January 2017 (without pay but with benefits), and apparently will be forced to apologize for his actions as a condition of reinstatement. According to…
BY JOHN K. WILSON William Ringenberg is a Professor of History at Taylor University and the author of the new book, The Christian College and the Meaning of Academic Freedom: Truth-Seeking in Community (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). AcademeBlog co-editor John K. Wilson interviewed Ringenberg via email about his new book. John K. Wilson: You seem to…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, has written a detailed 11,000-word theoretical account of what academic freedom means. In response, I want to examine some of his arguments in detail, although I don’t have time and space to address every point. But fundamentally, I think Wood takes academic…
BY JOHN K. WILSON I have not previously spoken out in defense of Melissa Click, the University of Missouri professor who was loudly denounced for supporting a student protest by keeping out student journalists. Like many others, I strongly opposed her actions, and despite many threats against her and calls for her dismissal, she was…
Today marks the 100th anniversary of a famous editorial in the New York Times denouncing academic freedom, one that I quote in my article about the media and academic freedom in the new issue of Academe. Reacting to an AAUP report about the firing of Scott Nearing by the University of Pennsylvania, the New…
National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood has a column at Minding the Campus today arguing for an 7-point plan for what he calls “a real program for reform” of American higher education that would “take back the campus from those who are intent on making it a 24-7 taxpayer-subsidized indoctrination camp.” The notion that…
Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association which threatens to undermine the union movement in America by banning “fair share” or agency fees paid by workers for the services of a union in representing them. The AAUP, which is partly a union, has an obvious self-interest in fighting this…
Wheaton College officials are moving to fire tenured professor Larycia Hawkins because she made comments deemed too pro-Muslim by the administration. Hawkins’ trouble began when she announced that she would be wearing a hijab in solidarity with Muslims in the wake of Donald Trump’s call for banning Muslim immigrants. She declared, “I love my Muslim…
Yesterday, Joerg Tiede posted an excerpt from his new book about the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles. Tiede noted that although the Declaration was presented on December 31, 1915, the AAUP members did not vote to approve it until January 1, 1916. So on this, the centennial of the of the slightly misdated Declaration, it’s…