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…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is reposted with permission from the website of the Colorado state conference of the AAUP. Despite that the symposium gods burdened Boulder with an inevitable spring blizzard, the AAUP Academic Freedom Symposium at CU-Boulder on April 29th was inspiring and memorable. The melodramatic weather could not discourage participants or…
BY HANK REICHMAN Blowhard-in-chief Donald Trump’s condemnation of “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides” in the wake of this weekend’s events in Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia (UVA), has been criticized so extensively and justifiably, even by members of his own party — many of whom themselves bear responsibility…
BY AARON BARLOW Underlying the mania for “assessment” and “accountability” in higher education is an elitist sensibility that, having gone unexamined for too long, has undermined real efforts at providing useful education for everyone, no matter what college or what level. Not only is it creating a two-tiered model of education, but it is changing…