This is a letter written by George Mason sophomore Mark Hammond to the George Mason student newspaper, The Fourth Estate. For some reason, that newspaper never published it on its website; so he has given permission to Connor Gibson, a co-founder of the group Un-Koch My Campus, to disseminate it. _________________________ “Last fall, when…
New Zealand In New Zealand, Jarrod Gilbert, a sociologist at the University of Canterbury, claimed that he was “being muzzled by the police” (Bootham). Gilbert said police asked researchers “to sign contracts when they released data, and a standard clause gave them the right to veto any findings being published” and that “he had been…
The AAUP at its 2016 annual meeting today voted unanimously to censure the administrations of the College of Saint Rose, for the dismissal of 23 tenured and tenure-track professors, and the University of Missouri (Columbia), for the Board’s dismissal of Melissa Click without due process. The members also rejected a proposal to give Committee A authority to…
BY HANK REICHMAN Two days ago I posted a piece about the University of Chicago’s ill-considered attempt to discipline graduating senior and student body president Tyler Kissinger for his leadership of a peaceful and brief sit-in advocating, among other demands, a $15 minimum wage for campus workers. Kissinger’s disciplinary hearing was held yesterday and The…
BY HANK REICHMAN Jonathan Cole, professor and former provost at Columbia University, is a distinguished advocate for academic freedom whose work I have long admired. Last year he and his Columbia colleague, Akeel Bilgrami, edited an important collection of thoughtful essays, Who’s Afraid of Academic Freedom?, which I review along with several other titles in…
BY HANK REICHMAN The University of Chicago has earned well-merited praise for its powerful 2014 “Statement on Principles of Free Expression,” a document that has been endorsed by a growing number of institutions. That statement, authored by a committee chaired by Geoffrey R. Stone, Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law and former Provost…
BY PETER N. KIRSTEIN Emanuel Goldman’s, “Why an Academic Boycott of Israel is Wrong,” appears in the May-June 2016 issue of Academe: Magazine of the A.A.U.P. The article is needlessly inflammatory and dismissive of ethical challenges to Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Professor Goldman claims that its supporters, which includes many tens of thousands of students…
Today is the start of the Scholars at Risk 2016 Global Congress, “Universities in a Dangerous World: Defending Higher Education Communities and Values” at McGill University in Montreal. If you are not fortunate enough to be in Montreal in person with us, you can watch a livestream of all the events beginning today at 1pm…
Guest blogger Roberto J. González is an alumnus of UC Berkeley. He is chair of San José State University’s anthropology department and author of several books including Militarizing Culture: Essays on the Warfare State (2010) and Zapotec Science: Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca (2001). His position on academic boycotts differs from that of…
Australia—Federal Funding for the Copenhagen Consensus Centre at Flinders University In October, Simon Birmingham, the education minister in the new government of Malcolm Turnbull, announced that it would uphold the decision by Christopher Pyne, the education minister under former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, to withdraw “funding offered to Bjørn Lomborg for the creation of…