BY JOHN K. WILSON Matthew Ehrlich’s new book, Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK, explores the history of two prominent academic freedom cases in the 1960s at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ehrlich is a professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His…
BY JOHN K. WILSON January 23, 2022 marks the fifty-fifth anniversary of the US Supreme Court’s ruling in what may be the most important legal case protecting academic freedom: Keyishian v. Board of Regents. The poetic words of Justice William Brennan’s majority decision have echoed through our legal system and become a fundamental part of…
BY HANK REICHMAN Given the case’s high importance, a U.S. District Court judge says he hopes to issue an order by January 24 on a suit filed by a group of University of Florida professors to invalidate the school’s conflict of interest policy as an unconstitutional infringement on freedom of speech. “This is on the…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a recent zoom meeting I had occasion to meet Monica Casper, dean of the College of Arts and Letters at San Diego State University. Dean Casper mentioned that she had recently been the target of online harassment and controversy for some tweets she had posted. Curious, I looked into the case…
BY JOHN K. WILSON This week, there was what Jonathan Turley called a “major controversy brewing over free speech and censorship at Emory Law Journal.” Robert George argued, “It’s hard to think of a stupider, more self-defeating idea than imposing political litmus tests on articles submitted to major law reviews. But that’s what the Emory…
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…