BY HANK REICHMAN The president of Williams College in Massachusetts, a supposedly “elite” liberal arts institution, has ordered the cancellation of a student-organized speaking engagement by an author characterized by many as a white supremacist. In a letter to the college community on Thursday, Adam Falk said the views espoused in the writings of John…
BY HANK REICHMAN For some time we have been repeatedly assaulted by exaggerated claims from the political Right that student objections to institutional racism and sexism on campuses violate freedom of speech by imposing an orthodoxy of “political correctness.” Conservative pundits have openly mocked student charges that racist and sexist behavior can be traumatic for…
BY HANK REICHMAN Scholars in Poland have rallied to the defense of one of the world’s leading Holocaust historians after reports that Poland intends to withdraw a national honor because he claimed that Poles were complicit in Nazi war crimes. Polish-American scholar Jan T. Gross, Professor of History at Princeton University, is threatened with being…
BY HANK REICHMAN The student videojournalist who was threatened by professor Melissa Click, leading to a municipal assault charge, said Friday that he wants state lawmakers to stop using the incident to justify budget cuts for the University of Missouri (UM), according to a report in the Columbia Tribune. Mark Schierbecker’s video of Click —…
BY JOHN K. WILSON William Ringenberg is a Professor of History at Taylor University and the author of the new book, The Christian College and the Meaning of Academic Freedom: Truth-Seeking in Community (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). AcademeBlog co-editor John K. Wilson interviewed Ringenberg via email about his new book. John K. Wilson: You seem to…
BY JONATHAN REES Aaron has already pointed you this morning to the very sad and strange events going on at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Maryland. I want to quote from the same IHE article that Aaron did and add some different emphasis: “As an employee of Mount St. Mary’s University, you owe a duty…
Writing for NPR, Camila Domonoski has reported the following: “A professor at an evangelical Christian college who was suspended for saying Christians and Muslims worship the same God will no longer be teaching at the school. “As we’ve reported, Larycia Hawkins, an associate professor of political science who had tenure at Wheaton College in Illinois,…
BY DAVID RANDALL David Randall, the Director of Communications at the National Association of Scholars, has written a response to John K. Wilson’s critique of Peter Wood’s “The Architecture of Intellectual Freedom.” We’ve decided to put it up as a guest post, since it’s a little long for a blog comment. It’s written in the…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, has written a detailed 11,000-word theoretical account of what academic freedom means. In response, I want to examine some of his arguments in detail, although I don’t have time and space to address every point. But fundamentally, I think Wood takes academic…
BY MARTIN KICH On January 26, AFEC-AAUP and the Visual and Media Arts department of Emerson College hosted Danny Ledonne, one of Emerson College’s most controversial graduates. Ledonne (‘04) spoke about artistic and academic freedom after a screening of his critically praised documentary film, Playing Columbine, which explores the controversy created by his video game, Super Columbine…