POSTED BY MARTIN KICH An ever-lengthening list of faculty have come under fire for tweets and other social-media posts that they have made. But anyone who actually looks regularly at Twitter feeds must know three things: first, the medium itself stokes extremes of expression; second, almost nothing that a faculty member has ever tweeted comes…
BY HANK REICHMAN Florida Governor Rick Scott declared a state of emergency; the University of Florida spent a half-million dollars on security; protesters were peaceful, if boisterous; and neo-Nazi nincompoop Richard Spencer managed to speak on the Gainesville campus for nearly two hours and even answered questions from the audience. (At one point CUNY Professor…
BY HANK REICHMAN I have occasionally on this blog posted items about the conflicted views of American conservatives about academic freedom, at times calling attention to the ideas of principled academic conservatives whose approach and arguments often run counter to the unfortunate hostility to higher education now rapidly gaining credibility on the right, and with…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Joan W. Scott, Professor Emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study and former chair and current member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and Christopher Newfield, Professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara, member of the Academe magazine advisory board, and author of The…
BY HANK REICHMAN Not long after I posted an item on the shouting down of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra by pro-Trump protesters at Whittier College, I stumbled across one of the more sanctimonious and misguided pieces I’ve yet encountered about the current free speech battles on college and university campuses. In “Left-Wing Drexel Professor…
BY HANK REICHMAN It had to happen. In the latest instance of a campus speaker being shouted down and, in effect, prevented from speaking by protesters, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over DACA, was confronted, not by “antifa” liberal “snowflakes,” but by pro-Trump hecklers, who, according…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In an article for Salon titled “Freedom of Speech Only Goes So Far on College Campuses,” Charlie May reports: White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders wants the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) to investigate one of its professors after she strongly criticized President Donald Trump and the consequences of…
BY JOHN K. WILSON At Minding the Campus, Peter Wood’s essay about “The Case for Colonialism” article argues this: “And perhaps we should not forget the names of those thousands who signed the petitions. It might be a good exercise for deans and provosts who have received from academic search committee recommendations to appoint candidates…
BY TIM McGETTIGAN Tim McGettigan is Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University, Pueblo. It has required nearly four years and humongous legal costs, but I can finally say that I have won my First Amendment battle against Colorado State University. Four years ago, the CSU Board of Governors, former CSU Chancellor Michael Martin and…
BY HANK REICHMAN I thought I might write something in response to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ speech this week at Georgetown University, but then I read Dahlia Lithwick’s take, “The Eggshell Attorney General,” and figured I had little to add. Here are her first three paragraphs, but the entire piece is worth reading: Almost every…