BY JOHN K. WILSON A conference on academic freedom being held this weekend at Stanford has spurred controversy over its perceived conservative bias and closed format. A group of more than fifty Stanford academics signed “A Closed Conference on Academic Freedom is a Contradiction,” a statement denouncing the conference for its lack of public access.…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Fifty years ago, on June 26, 1972, the US Supreme Court issued one of the most important rulings protecting free speech on campus in the case of Healy v. James. As the conservative Supreme Court has proven this week, even a fifty-year precedent is not safe if five justices decide to…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On May 23, the Princeton Board of Trustees voted to fire tenured professor Joshua Katz on the recommendation of a dean and the president, and with the approval of a faculty committee. Katz’s defenders claim that he is being persecuted for his extramural utterances calling a black student group a “terrorist…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On March 16, 2021, Boise State University ordered the suspension of fifty-five classes enrolling more than 1,299 students in its required course, UF 200: Foundations of Ethics & Diversity. The mass suspension lasted for eight days, and it is one of the largest targeted suspensions of a course in the history…
BY JOHN K. WILSON This week, the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA) wrote a letter to the president of Princeton, asking him to censor a campus website in order to protect a conservative professor’s hurt feelings. This letter is not a defense of academic freedom; it’s an attack on academic freedom. And the AFA is not…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Matthew Ehrlich’s new book, Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK, explores the history of two prominent academic freedom cases in the 1960s at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ehrlich is a professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His…
BY JOHN K. WILSON January 23, 2022 marks the fifty-fifth anniversary of the US Supreme Court’s ruling in what may be the most important legal case protecting academic freedom: Keyishian v. Board of Regents. The poetic words of Justice William Brennan’s majority decision have echoed through our legal system and become a fundamental part of…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On Wednesday, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Review posted dueling essays by Northwestern law professor Andrew Koppelman and me (reposted from this blog) about the controversy over the Emory Law Journal. Prof. Koppleman and I decided to continue the discussion, and below is our back-and-forth exchange. John K. Wilson: You wrote…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Yesterday, I published an opinion essay at Inside Higher Ed titled, “The Inevitable Problem of Self-Censorship.” I argue that surveys showing that a majority of college students report self-censorship are not meaningful ways to understand repression on campus because everyone self-censors to some degree. These surveys are also easy to manipulate.…
BY JOHN K. WILSON This week, there was what Jonathan Turley called a “major controversy brewing over free speech and censorship at Emory Law Journal.” Robert George argued, “It’s hard to think of a stupider, more self-defeating idea than imposing political litmus tests on articles submitted to major law reviews. But that’s what the Emory…