BY UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO FACULTY The following open letter from University of Chicago faculty appeared in the Chicago Maroon on Sept. 13. Dear Students of the Class of 2020: As you have undoubtedly noticed, you and your new institution have been in the media spotlight lately. We want to take this opportunity to voice our…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Members of “Academics for Peace” and Education and Science Workers Union (Eğitim-SEN) have been removed from their positions in public higher education institutions permanently! In January 2016, 2,218 scholars from Turkey signed a petition titled “We will not be a party to this crime,” also known as the Peace Petition. Since…
BY PETER N. KIRSTEIN One of the concerns that emerged during the ideological purge of Steven Salaita was its potential evisceration of the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Many feared that the vile assault on academic freedom and shared governance that precipitated the irreparable harm of a tenured professor’s career, would…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a widely publicized letter to incoming freshmen this week, University of Chicago (UC) Dean of Students John Ellison offered a bold defense of academic freedom and freedom of expression, which included this sentence: Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel…
BY JOHN K. WILSON It’s praiseworthy that the University of Chicago has announced to its students a “commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression.” But there is a problem: in this announcement, the University actually calls for limiting freedom of expression, and University of Chicago policies also severely limit free inquiry and student rights. According…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In terms of its impact on higher education, a major feature of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act was to be “an outright ban on extremist speakers, including non-violent extremists, . . . on university campuses” (Travis). Home Secretary Theresa May proposed that such a ban be “backed by contempt of court…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In February, the Guardian included a piece on the results of study of freedom of speech on British campuses conducted by the online magazine Spiked: “80% of universities are shown, as a result of their official policies and actions, to have either restricted or actively censored free speech and expression on…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH On August 3, the Editorial Board of the Chicago Tribune published an editorial titled “DePaul University’s Fear of Words.” This spring, protesters disrupted a talk by Milo Yiannopoulos, sponsored by the university’s Young Republicans. In response to that event, which might have escalated to violence, the university’s president “described the gold…
BY HANK REICHMAN Advocates of academic freedom generally find freedom of information laws beneficial. Such laws enhance public knowledge and debate on the workings of government agencies, including public universities. But as a 2013 amicus brief filed by the AAUP and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) pointed out, “in evaluating disclosure under FOIA, the public’s right to know…
POSTED BY HENRY REICHMAN The following piece by Steve Lubet, Williams Memorial Professor of Law at Northwestern University, was posted originally on The Faculty Lounge. It is reposted with his permission. The Mess at Oberlin Oberlin College just announced that Professor Joy Karega will be suspended with pay for the coming semester, pending the result…