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…
BY HANK REICHMAN Amid the growing controversy over the leak of thousands of emails hacked from servers at the Democratic National Committee, apparently by a group linked to the Russian government, comes this report in The Times of London: President Putin has launched a secret propaganda assault on Britain from within its own borders, The Times can…
BY JOHN K. WILSON DePaul University has banned conservative pundit Ben Shapiro from speaking on campus to the Young Americans for Freedom student group. Bob Janis, Vice President of Facilities Operations at DePaul, sent an email declaring, “Given the experiences and security concerns that some other schools have had with Ben Shapiro speaking on their…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the Fall of 2014 I posted several entries to this blog (see here, here, and here) suggesting that “recent attempts to enforce standards of ‘civility’ at colleges and universities, often . . . in response to pro-Palestinian expression, recalled previous efforts in the 1940s and 1950s to exclude alleged communists from…
BY JOERG TIEDE Walter P. Metzger, professor of history at Columbia University for his entire career and the AAUP’s official historian for most of that time, has passed away. Professor Metzger dedicated his entire professional life to the AAUP, both by contributing to the ongoing work of the Association, in particular on Committee A on Academic Freedom…
POSTED BY HENRY REICHMAN The following is the text of a letter sent today (July 25) to President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and signed by nearly 400 U.S. academics, including AAUP President Rudy Fichtenbaum, AAUP First Vice-President Henry Reichman, AAUP-CBC Chair Howard Bunsis, AAUP General Counsel…