Last week, an Illinois court ruled (pdf) for the first time enforcing Illinois’ law protecting college newspapers (a law passed in the wake of a 7th Circuit ruling against freedom of the student press). The court ruled that former faculty advisor Gerian Steven Moore, who had been fired from his post, must be reinstated. As…
Rush Limbaugh’s insults against Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke have sparked a national controversy. Today (Wednesday), I’ll be discussing Limbaugh (and my book about him) on Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show (6-7pm ET) and Thursday on the public radio show To the Point (2pm ET). But Limbaugh’s attacks on Fluke are also a reminder of the…
This essay by Peter N. Kirstein (a professor of history at St. Xavier University, Vice President of the Illinois Conference of the AAUP and is chair of the Illinois Conference Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure) originally appeared on his blog. By Peter N. Kirstein John Garvey, president of censured Catholic University of America…
On March 3-4, students at Harvard are organizing a “One State Conference: Israel/Palestine and the One State Solution.” I don’t want to delve into the charges of bigotry that can be leveled by either side. My concern here is about freedom of speech. On David Horowitz’s Frontpagemag, Steven Plaut harshly condemned the conference in over-the-top…
In the case of Teresa Wagner v. Carolyn Jones, a conservative candidate for a law professor job alleges political discrimination at the University of Iowa. Peter Wood writes, “We have seldom had so clear a case of a conservative academic being steamrolled by a politically correct faculty.” He’s right. This isn’t a very clear-cut case…
It’s Valentine’s Day, and time once again for right-wing Catholic groups to denounce academic freedom at Catholic colleges. But it’s also time for them to celebrate a victory in making The Vagina Monologues the most-censored play in America. The far-right Cardinal Newman Society reports that nine Catholic colleges will be presenting the play this year:…
Newt Gingrich declared in 1995, “I am the most seriously professorial politician since Woodrow Wilson.” If Gingrich wins the Republican nomination, we will see the first presidential contest fought by ex-professors in American history. But if Gingrich wins, what would his presidency mean for higher education? Gingrich’s history as a professor certainly doesn’t make him…
The following guest post was authored by David Rintoul, who is a biology professor and faculty senator at Kansas State University. Universities have many policies and procedures for resolving disagreements that arise between faculty members, between faculty members and administration, between faculty members and students, etc. Many of these are carefully crafted in order to…
By James Simeone The Illinois Wesleyan University AAUP reading group met on September 29, 2011 to discuss Matthew Finkin and Robert Post’s For the Common Good: Principles of Academic Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). The discussion was framed by the censoring, earlier in September, of a student poet in Hansen Student Center. A…