BY JOHN K. WILSON The new Academic Freedom Alliance launched on March 8, 2021. Below is my interview via email with Keith E. Whittington, Chair of the Academic Committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and the author of Speak Freely: Why Universities Must…
BY JOHN K. WILSON This past week, Georgetown law school fired adjunct professor Sandra Sellers (and suspended her co-instructor David Batson) for an accidentally recorded conversation about racial disparities in student grades. In the video, which was recorded in February when the taping of the class continued after all the students had left the session,…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Heterodox Academy has issued a new survey of college students that is being touted as evidence that students fear controversial issues. But there are some critical questions that need to be asked.about it. The survey repeatedly asked the following style of question (about politics, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, the 2020…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, issued a 195-page report, “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship” and published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Academic Freedom Is…
BY JOHN K. WILSON In an extraordinary attack on academic freedom, three fellows from Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution–Scott Atlas, Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson–are demanding censorship of faculty and the student newspaper in order to silence criticism of themselves. They write in an article at the Stanford Review (a conservative student publication), “as individuals we…
BY JOHN K. WILSON We are all living in the political and media worlds that Rush Limbaugh created. Limbaugh, who died this morning, transformed America in enormous ways, most of them negative. I harshly criticized Limbaugh in my book about him, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Rush Limbaugh’s Assault on Reason, which was published…
BY JOHN K. WILSON In December, the Northwestern University AAUP chapter released a “Report of the Committee on Northwestern University’s COVID-19 Response,” which was endorsed by the chapter members and more than 100 faculty. Tomorrow, the authors of the report will discuss it in an online session on Tues. Feb. 16 at 5-6pm Central time…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Today, I’ll be speaking on a PEN America panel about “Academic Freedom and Classroom Conduct” along with Jonathan Friedman, Neijma Celestine-Donnor, and Amna Khalid. So I wanted to offer a few thoughts about what academic freedom means in the classroom. Along with freedom of research and extramural utterances, freedom of teaching…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The following is an email interview I conducted with Jonathan Marks, the author of the new book being published today titled Let’s Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education (Princeton University Press). Marks is a professor of politics at Ursinus College, and he will be discussing his book on Thurs.…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The firing of Garrett Felber by the University of Mississippi keeps getting curiouser and curiouser. Earlier this month, I criticized the reasons offered for his dismissal. And Henry Reichman (who, unlike me, can officially speak for the AAUP) also expressed many concerns. However, now University of Mississippi officials have suggested some…