Chicago Tribune sportswriter Shannon Ryan has an important column today attacking the efforts of Missouri legislators to punish activist student athletes who boycott games (and fine coaches who support them): “This is another attempt to control athletes, silence them and pigeonhole them as solely money-makers for the university.” Even if I don’t think football players should…
The famous “dancing cop” of Providence, Rhode Island, Tony Lepore, has been fired for organizing a “Blue Lives Matter” protest critical of the Black Lives Matter. Steven Paro, Providence Police Commissioner, declared: “Mr. Lepore was not authorized to speak on behalf of the Providence Police Dept. and his actions were, in my judgment, a disservice…
Hans-Joerg Tiede, a professor of computer science at Illinois Wesleyan University who will be joining the AAUP staff next year, has written a new book about the early history of the AAUP, University Reform: The Founding of the American Association of University Professors (Johns Hopkins University Press). John K. Wilson interviewed Tiede via email about…
Here is the press release from Salaita’s lawyers: Settlement Reached in Case of Professor Fired for “Uncivil” Tweets November 12, 2015, Chicago – Today, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and co-counsel Loevy & Loevy announced the settlement of Professor Steven Salaita’s case against the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) for firing him from…
Tim Wolfe, president of the University of Missouri, resigned this morning under intense pressure. I’m still trying to figure out what Wolfe did wrong. The racism on campus seems no different from a thousand other campuses, or the rest of our society. The response of Wolfe to that racism, with indifference, platitudes, and apologies, also…
Jonathan Marks at Minding the Campus has denounced the AAUP, claiming that it “takes a sharp left turn.” Marks claims that the AAUP’s Centennial Declaration is “the most nakedly partisan document to emerge from the AAUP in recent memory.” Marks writes, “According to the Declaration, higher education faces one and only one enemy, corporations or business…
Steven Salaita spoke tonight at the University of Illinois at Chicago before a supportive crowd of 150 about his new book, Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom, which Aaron Barlow reviewed and I also reviewed last week. Salaita will be speaking on Oct. 13 in Urbana. He wondered about the controversy that got him fired, “Why was it…
At Minding the Campus, National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood calls the adoption by other colleges of the University of Chicago statement on freedom of expression “a dangerous mistake.” It is always dangerous when extremists imagine that freedom of expression must not be applied to their enemies, and that’s exactly what Wood does. Wood…
Today is the publication of Steven Salaita’s new book, Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom (Haymarket Books). Salaita’s book is smart, charming, funny, intense, civil, and sincere—and it’s a powerful argument for just how wrong the University of Illinois trustees were to fire him. Salaita’s book may not persuade those who supported…
April Kelly-Woessner argued last week at Heterodox Academy that “young people are less politically tolerant than their parents’ generation.” Titled, “How Marcuse made today’s students less tolerant than their parents,” Kelly-Woessner blames intolerance by young people on 1960s New Left theories of “repressive tolerance.” While she raises some important concerns about intolerance, Kelly-Woessner misses the…