BY ALAN SINGER Founded in 1636 as Harvard College, Harvard University is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. Today, as one of the elite American universities, it is at the center of much of the conflict over how a university should respond to protests over the war in Gaza. Claudine Gay…
BY DAVID MOSHMAN Discussions about campus matters related to Gaza, including posts on this blog, have focused on free speech issues associated with campus protests. Let me shift the focus. Universities should indeed support freedom of speech, but their primary function is to seek and communicate the truth, including the truth about Gaza, and their…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH For the June 3rd meeting of Portland State University’s Faculty Senate, twenty-one faculty and staff members submitted the following question for PSU President Ann Cudd: In your remarks to Senate last month and in your email “Evolving Community Expectations” on 5/7/2024, you refer to “vile messages” and to ‘”that kind of…
BY HANK REICHMAN Sociologist, antiwar activist, and internationally renowned Marxist thinker Boris Kagarlitsky, a professor at the Moscow Higher School of Economics and head of the Moscow think tank The Institute for Globalization Studies and Social Movements, who was convicted of “justifying terrorism” for remarks he made about Russia’s war against Ukraine and sentenced to…
BY IAN LUSTICK The following is the text of remarks delivered at a rally in support of academic freedom at the University of Pennsylvania on January 22, 2024. First let me say that I have nothing against billionaires. While I can’t say that some of my best friends are billionaires, I can say that, from…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY The Georgia conference of the AAUP recently published its semi-annual newsletter and I thought readers of this blog might be interested in one element of it. The conference asked from the state university system all complaints concerning academic freedom and freedom of speech submitted to the system’s confidential ethics hotline within the…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of my May 15, 2024, keynote address to the international symposium, “Academic Freedom in the Twenty-First Century,” sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundations and the Academia Europaea HERCuLES in Stockholm, Sweden. A slightly expanded version will be published next year, along with other symposium presentations, in European Review. …
BY JENNIFER RUTH Portland State University has no quads on which to pitch tents, but running between some of our major buildings, including the library, are park blocks owned by the city. When threatened with trespassing by Portland Police, the students moved their protest from the grass onto the steps of the library. From there,…
BY ALAN SINGER Academic freedom is often paired with freedom of speech, enshrined in the Bill of Rights as part of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. But freedom of speech is not absolute, and neither is academic freedom. Academic freedom is bound by the same legal restraints as freedom of speech, but…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH On April 23, 2024, the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee issued the following statement. We condemn in the strongest terms the wave of recent repression of students and faculty engaged in peaceful and principled protest by university administrations across the country. These include the draconian treatment of students by the administrations of Barnard…