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…
BY DAVID MOSHMAN People often use their freedom of speech to disrupt the speech of others, especially on college campuses in recent years. Of course people have a right to protest, provided they are sufficiently quiet, brief, or distant so as not to prevent the speaker from being heard. On August 25, University of Nebraska–Lincoln…
BY SUSAN HEGEMAN We’ve had a tumultuous fall in Florida. It began in August, shortly after the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, when Richard Spencer, one of the speakers in Charlottesville, applied for a speaking venue at the University of Florida. UF initially denied his request, citing safety concerns, especially after it…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of an op-ed piece authored by the Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association (BFA) and published September 26 in the Daily Californian, the independent campus newspaper at the University of California at Berkeley, in response to recent events involving Milo Yiannopoulos’s failed “Free Speech Week.” The…
BY HANK REICHMAN Dozens of Georgetown University students, joined by law professors, gathered this morning to protest a speech by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The faculty members initially took a knee and later linked arms. Inside the hall where Sessions spoke, a line of students sitting near the back stood up and placed black…
POSTED BY KELLY HAND We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 8 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. The journal features recent scholarship on academic freedom and its relation to shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining. Highlights from the volume include an article by Andrew Ross on academic labor and human rights at…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Milo Yiannopoulos’ much-hyped Free Speech Week at Berkeley has disappeared, not with a bang but with a whimper. The whimper came yesterday when Milo made a brief appearance on Sproul Plaza, where he sang the Star-Spangled Banner (without kneeling) and left about 30 minutes later. Berkeley spent an estimated $800,000 on…
BY HANK REICHMAN Clownish self-promoting bigot Milo Yiannopoulos fulfilled his pledge to speak on Sunday at the University of California at Berkeley campus, despite the cancellation the previous day of his fraudulent “Free Speech Week.” According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the bigoted bozo blew kisses, signed autographs and took selfies for about 15 minutes…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH At the beginning of September, Jonathan Zimmerman wrote an article for Salon titled “Don’t Tape Our Teachers: Why Surreptitious Recording in the Classroom Isn’t OK.” Zimmerman surveys a number of recent instances in which teachers have expressed strong political opinions that have surreptitiously been recorded by students, that have then been…