BY JOHN K. WILSON The outrage machine against “cancel culture” has already been put into full motion with Joseph Epstein, an emeritus lecturer at Northwestern University who retired from the English Department almost 20 years ago but still manages to annoy people with his rather stupid op-eds in the Wall Street Journal. The latest essay…
BY JOHN K. WILSON I have an essay posted today at the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) blog about a particularly disturbing case at Kent State University where state legislators are explicitly threatening millions of dollars in state funding unless the university bans a textbook that offended the Republican politicians. Here are…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On October 17, about 300 Northwestern University students and supporters held a protest in Evanston as part of their ongoing efforts to abolish the campus police department and enact other reforms. During the protest, a campus banner was burned, various buildings and even murals in town were tagged with messages including…
BY JOHN K. WILSON This week the College Free Speech Survey was released, which was developed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the conservative website RealClearEducation, and the research firm College Pulse, and funded by the Charles Koch Institute. It is being marketed as the largest survey ever conducted of students about…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Earlier today, an event at San Francisco State University was banned by leading tech giants after a campaign to censor it was led by a large number of pro-Israel groups. It is an example of the growing power of conservative cancel culture, and this censorship reveals the threat to academic freedom…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS), a Canadian conservative advocacy group for academic freedom, issued a letter denouncing last week’s Scholar Strike. I believe the SAFS argument is wrong on two points, first when it claims that when universities support political activity, they are violating the academic freedom of students…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Mary Chappell, editor-in-chief of the Loyola Phoenix (Loyola University of Chicago) has a great editorial this week rejecting attacks from student protesters who objected to being reported on. The student protesters at Loyola argued: As we all know by now, 7 of our friends were arrested while protesting. Some of the…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On August 31, Illinois Wesleyan University announced that three tenured faculty would be given one-year terminal contracts and then fired because of controversial plans to discontinue academic programs in anthropology, French, Italian, and religious studies while expanding programs in economics and business. The AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance…
BY JOHN K. WiLSON Tony Woodlief in the Wall Street Journal on Aug. 30 offered a conservative critique of free speech absolutism, claiming that “the intolerance prevailing on college campuses isn’t the result of too little speech. It’s a consequence of too much speech.” Woodlief represents a disturbing trend on the right, where a sneer…