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…
Former Northwestern professor Alice Dreger spoke in Evanston on Sept. 30, a month after resigning from her position in the medical school to protest censorship of the medical journal Atrium after she was guest editor of the “Bad Girls” issue. Dreger told an audience at Bookends and Beginnings bookstore that Northwestern administrators had removed the issue from…
The new issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom was released yesterday, including Cary Nelson’s much-anticipated essay. As an argument for firing Salaita, Nelson’s essay is a complete failure. Robert Warrior writes a response, but it’s unnecessary because nothing Nelson writes provides any evidence to justify Salaita’s dismissal. The bulk of the essay is devoted…
The proposed intolerance policy at the University of California is a badly written, repressive, and fundamentally misguided policy that any true university should be embarrassed to even consider adopting. Universities are free to express collective values so long as they do not seek to punish those who disagree. But they ought to be careful in…
One year ago, on September 11, 2014, Stephen Salaita was fired by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. This is not a date that has attracted any media attention on its anniversary, and seems to have gone completely unmentioned, perhaps because Salaita’s dismissal by this time was a foregone conclusion. But this is a…