BY HANK REICHMAN In all the hubbub over the free speech rights of outside speakers on campus, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that efforts by students and administrations at colleges and universities to bar those they deem controversial are hardly limited to right-wing provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter, or Richard Spencer. …
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this year I posted an item about political threats to the existence of Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and European University in St. Petersburg, Russia. The threats to both institutions continue, but it now appears that European University may be at the end of its rope, having lost both its…
BY HANK REICHMAN Recently installed University of California at Berkeley (UCB) Chancellor Carol Christ has proclaimed this to be the campus’s “free speech year.” As part of that effort Christ has announced that the infamous bigot-provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, whose talk at Berkeley was canceled February 1 in the face of violent protests, would return to…
BY HANK REICHMAN “We can respect the right of free speech without having to respect the ideas being uttered.” — Joan W. Scott, “On Free Speech and Academic Freedom” (forthcoming) This is the final installment in a four-part series. Part I may be found here; part II is here; part III is here. Academic Freedom…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this summer I posted a piece praising conservative scholar Jonathan Marks for his forthright defense of the academic freedom of African-American activist Lisa Durden, dismissed from her part-time community college teaching position in response to comments she made on Fox News. Now Marks has weighed in on the controversy surrounding lecturer…
POSTED BY THE AAUP Alarmed by news that the University of Tampa has fired a faculty member over a tweet suggesting that Hurricane Harvey was “karma” for Texas because it voted Republican, the AAUP has been in contact with the affected faculty member, Kenneth Storey. Our understanding is that Storey, a visiting assistant professor of…
BY JOHN K. WILSON We have seen many cases recently of professors being fired for their political opinions on twitter, but the University of Tampa’s firing of Ken Storey today is one of the more extreme, ridiculous, and utterly bizarre examples. The University of Tampa announced: On Sunday, Aug. 27, visiting assistant professor of sociology…
BY HANK REICHMAN As classes begin at colleges and universities across the country the wave of targeted online harassment of faculty members in response to comments made as private citizens — and the often cowardly responses of their administrations — continues unabated. At Dartmouth College, lecturer Mark Bray, an emerging expert on anti-fascist movements, received…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Today’s decision by the University of Florida to ban rental of space for an event by white supremacist Robert Spencer is a threat to free speech on campus, and the reasoning behind it poses a danger to a wide range of speech. University of Florida president W. Kent Fuchs justified his…
BY HANK REICHMAN Almost one in four lecturers at universities in the United Kingdom claims to have been subjected to bullying by colleagues over their academic views, a recently published survey suggests. Of 2,300 people who responded to a poll on academic freedom, 23 per cent said they had suffered workplace bullying on account of…