BY AARON BARLOW When my father returned home from the Pacific after the end of WWII, he found no signs remained of his existence in his parents’ house. His mother, probably fearing he would never return (he was gone for three years), had ‘disappeared’ all of his belongings. He never forgave her for that. This…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The University of Chicago’s Committee on University Discipline for Disruptive Conduct has issued a new report. Peter Wood of the NAS praises the Chicago Report: “It is a welcome step for all of American higher education. Mostly it restores to the campus authorities charged with maintaining order the tools they need…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In an article published by AlterNet, Alex Kotch reports on the material released by UnKoch My Campus showing how the intensifying calls to protect free speech on campus are being used as a cover for suppressing progressive dissent and protest on campus—covering some of the same points that I highlighted in…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has issued a new report today, “Campus Free Speech, Academic Freedom, and the Problem of the BDS Movement.” It opens with a preposterous claim: “One of the greatest threats to academic freedom in the United States today is the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.”…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is the latest report from UnKoch My Campus. Although it does not entirely align with other recent discussions of this topic posted to this blog, I think that it contributes some new elements and details to that discussion: In the past month, state lawmakers across the country coordinated an…
BY STEVE MUMME This guest post is by Steve Mumme of the Colorado Conference. Knowledgeable observers of the higher education landscape will have noticed the dilemma that university presidents now suffer in the face of the Trump administration’s recent executive orders banning travel from seven predominantly Muslim nations. The U.S. President’s discriminatory hard line on…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Last week, an ad hoc committee of the Northwestern University faculty senate issued a report (pdf) addressing the cases of Laura Kipnis and the censorship of Atrium magazine. Kipnis, who was accused of retaliation for writing about a sexual harassment case on campus, has written a book about her experience, Unwanted…
![By Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://i0.wp.com/academeblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/charles_murray_2013_freedomfest.jpeg?resize=220%2C126&ssl=1)
BY AARON BARLOW Charles Murray is a complicated figure. A Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV), he married into a wealthy Thai family and spent time in the countryside as a PCV there during the 1960s. That type of experience, as any RPCV can tell you (as I can tell you), is formative. Immersion into another…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Shouting down speakers, such as the recent suppression of Charles Murray’s speech at Middlebury College by a large crowd of protesters, is wrong. Plain and simple. It’s wrong. Shouting down speakers is morally wrong, unprincipled, anti-intellectual, and utterly indefensible. For a long time, I thought this was an obvious position, but…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement was released by California Scholars for Academic Freedom: The newly inaugurated U.S. administration has created an atmosphere of violence, racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism. A less discussed aspect of these attacks is on academic freedom. The 2016 election has taken to new extremes the threats to academic freedom. We…