January 23, 2012 marks the 45th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, perhaps the most important case defending academic freedom in the history of law (see the essay by Marjorie Heins today about the case). I interviewed Harry Keyishian via email about the decision that bears his name. Harry…
Marjorie Heins heads the Free Expression Policy Project (www.fepproject.org) and is the author of Not in Front of the Children: “Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth. In the 1990s she directed the ACLU’s Arts Censorship Project; more recently, she has taught at NYU, UC-San Diego, and the American University of Paris. Her forthcoming book,…
Daniel Grant writes at Inside Higher Ed about the question of controversial art: “There are no rules of the road to help art instructors and college administrators in this realm.” Actually, there are many rules of the road long established by the art world and the theorists of freedom of speech. It’s very easy: you…
According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), “While all of 2011’s Speech Codes of the Month flagrantly violated students’ and faculty members’ right to free expression, two of them were so egregious that they deserve special mention as 2011’s Speech Codes of the Year.” But FIRE got a lot of things wrong…
Rick Santorum certainly knows how to pander to an audience. He’s running far to the right in Iowa for the Republican Presidential nomination, and so he goes after those darn librul professors: “Let’s look at colleges and universities,” he said. “They’ve become indoctrination centers for the left. Should we be subsidizing that?” He also criticized…
Call for articles: transFORMATIONS The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy ANNOUNCES A SPECIAL ISSUE TEACHING UNDER ATTACK CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS The editors of Transformations seek articles (5,000-10,000 words) and media essays (overviews on books, film, video, performance, art, music, websites, etc. 3,000 to 5,000 words) and items for an occasional feature, “The Material Culture…
I haven’t read David Graeber’s new book, Debt, which is leading to him being praised as “a prophet of the Occupy Wall Street movement.” What’s most interesting to me is that today’s leading academic voice of the issues sparking the 99% Movement is an American who teaches in England. And that’s because Graeber was pushed…
A critical legal case affecting the academic freedom of professors will be argued on Thursday, December 8 before the 7th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals in Chicago. Loretta Capeheart is a professor of Justice Studies at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) who alleges that the administration retaliated against her for defending the rights of students protesting…
Now that Newt Gingrich has seized the lead in the Republican presidential race, everyone will start going back to scrutinize his words. And there’s a lot of words. I wrote an entire book about Gingrich, and that was 15 years ago. Since then, Gingrich has said a lot of dumb things, but the most relevant…
Rarely have I read anything on the Chronicle of Higher Education website quite so repulsive as the blog by Diane Auer Jones demanding the firing of New York University professor Andrew Ross on grounds of “educational malpractice” for encouraging students to join the Occupy Student Loan movement. Incredibly, the video of Ross at Occupy Wall…