BY HANK REICHMAN On December 10, I had the pleasure of participating in a fantastic and timely program in the University of California (UC) National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement’s 2021 “Speech Spotlight Live” series. “Is Academic Freedom Under Siege?” featured Sigal Ben-Porath, Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and author of…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY An article in today’s edition of Inside Higher Ed covered a significant initiative that is picking up steam on campuses across the country. In response to laws passed or proposed by Republican-dominated state legislatures and boards of trustees that ban the teaching of “divisive” materials on race, racism, and gender at state…
BY THOMAS A. BRESLIN Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and his allies have used conflict-of-interest policies meant to keep China from poaching American intellectual property to muzzle Florida’s public college and university professors. So doing, they’ve managed to deny the public access to the expertise of public university and college faculty members, threatened public health, put…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF New York Times right-wing opinion writer Ross Douthat led the November 11, 2021, print edition of the editorial pages with “Why We Need New Colleges.” Readers familiar with his fantasy-laden writing will not be surprised. I always shake my head when reading Douthat’s never-documented imaginings, but sometimes, like that day, I…
BY JENNIFER RUTH If you haven’t seen it, you might want to read Colleen Flaherty’s excellent piece “Recentering the Bright Sheng Debate” in Inside Higher Ed today. Last Friday, I wrote about the vast libertarian network researched in the new book Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War. This funding, much of which…
BY HANK REICHMAN With freedom comes responsibility. That old maxim is frequently heard in controversies involving academic freedom. Too often it is taken simply to suggest that such freedom carries with it the responsibility to limit the degree to which freedom is exercised. Don’t rock the boat, we have been warned, if we don’t want…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday’s launch of a new “university,” the so-called University of Austin (or UATX; their own acronym, which looks more like a listing on the stock exchange), garnered widespread ridicule on academic social media. University of Rhode Island historian Erik Loomis no doubt spoke for many when he tweeted, “Honestly, making fun of…
BY STEVEN LUBET Three University of Florida political science professors have sued the university trustees and several officials for violations of the First Amendment and academic freedom, alleging that they had been prevented from “testifying on behalf of voting-rights groups in a lawsuit challenging Florida’s Senate Bill 90 (‘SB 90’).” In what appeared to be…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On November 1, Brian Soucek, Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California at Davis, spoke as part of the UC Davis Forums on the Public University and the Social Good on “Academic Freedom: Dangers and Distractions.” Professor Soucek is the outgoing chair of the University of California’s…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On October 22, I testified as an expert witness on academic freedom at a hearing to dismiss Lars Jensen, a tenured math professor at Truckee Meadow Community College (TMCC) in Nevada. Because I wasn’t able to make my full argument about Jensen’s case (the attorney for the administration opposed my testimony,…