Butler University Dean of Communications Gary Edgerton has fired the adviser of the student newspaper, Loni Smith McKown. Here’s how it happened: On August 19, McKown received an email sent to faculty by Edgerton about potential budget cuts due to lower projected enrollments. She forwarded the email to the editors of the Collegian, as she…
Billie Wright Dziech has an essay today at Inside Higher Ed arguing that there’s too much sexuality in our society, and so we need to restrict the freedom of professors and students in discussing sexuality in order to protect students from sexual assault. It’s a bizarre and disturbing argument that courses about sexuality are somehow…
The cover story of this month’s Atlantic magazine features Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s essay on “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Their thesis is simple: “A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.” Unfortunately, their thesis…
University of Illinois Provost Ilesanmi Adesida will be resigning his position next week and returning to his faculty position in the College of Engineering. No reason was given in the announcement this afternoon to the campus by acting chancellor Barbara Wilson, but Adesida was one of Phyllis Wise’s most trusted subordinates, and his personal emails…
This morning, the National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling overturning a decision last year by a Chicago district official that had supported the right of Northwestern’s football players to unionize. The NLRB ruled that the case “would not promote stability in labor relations.” They wrote, “Our decision is primarily premised on a finding” that…
This afternoon, the University of Illinois trustees’ Executive Committee voted to reject Phyllis Wise’s negotiated settlement and $400,000 payout to resign last week, effective today. The Executive Committee is made up of Chair Ed McMillan and trustees Karen Hasara and James Montgomery (the lone trustee who changed his mind about Salaita and voted against dismissing him). All…
Northwestern law professor Steven Lubet has an op-ed in today’s Chicago Tribune with the headline, “The writing is on the wall, U. of I.: Offer controversial scholar Steven Salaita a job.” It’s a well-written piece expressing Lubet’s previously expressed opinion that Salaita an anti-Semite and an idiot, but arguing that the U of I’s fight…
What are the most important revelations in Phyllis Wise’s secret personal emails that were uncovered on Friday? Perhaps the key fact is that these emails existed at all. Using a personal email address to evade FOIA requests is clearly unethical and possibly illegal. And confessing that this was the purpose, as Wise did, is remarkably stupid.…
The sudden resignation yesterday by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign chancellor Phyllis Wise now has a clear explanation: the U of I announced today that Wise and other administrator were using personal email accounts to engage in secret discussions about sensitive matters, and released new emails about the Salaita case. In one email to a…
The National Review’s Phi Beta Cons blog has yet another entry in its seeming endless series of posts predicting the imminent doom of academia. Like the world’s worst psychics, the conservative movement keeps declaring its certainty that higher education is a “bubble” and on the verge of annihilation. In reality, there is no bubble in…