BY JOHN K. WILSON Here are some upcoming 2017 events related to the AAUP and academic freedom: The AAUP Annual Conference is being held on June 14-17 in Washington DC. Register now: April 15 at midnight EDT is the deadline for early bird rates. Note that during this year’s event, there will also be a special…
BY HANK REICHMAN A little more than a month ago, Martin Kich posted to this blog a piece on the Koch network that prompted a lively and extensive exchange in the comments section between Conor Gibson of UnKoch My Campus, John Wilson, and Phil Magness, a professor at George Mason University, frequent commenter on this…
BY AARON BARLOW Somewhere around 1970, I walked by a wall on a college campus that had been plastered with a huge poster of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. Below, someone had splashed the words “loco parentis.” That was exactly how we students felt in those days about college and university power over our lives. Then, it…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted an item on threats to academic freedom at Central European University (CEU) in Hungary and European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP). Yesterday, tens of thousands of demonstrators swarmed Budapest in defense of the CEU. The protest drew some of the largest crowds against right-wing prime minister Victor Orban’s…
BY AARON BARLOW Stella Nyanzi, a medical anthropologist who earned her PhD at the University of London and who is currently a research fellow at Makerere University’s Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) in Kampala, Uganda (though her exact status at MISR seems a little uncertain), has been arrested in Kampala for “various offenses related…
BY HANK REICHMAN On April 4, the Hungarian Parliament passed a law that could compel Central European University (CEU), founded in 1991 by the liberal financier and philanthropist George Soros, the liberal financier and philanthropist who promotes democratic, transparent government and freedom of expression through his Open Society Foundations, to cease operations in the country. The…
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.”…