BY MARJORIE HEINS Harvard University’s announcement last month that it has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism was a sufficiently serious blow to academic freedom at that hallowed institution that it motivated me, as a graduate of Harvard Law School, to submit a letter to Harvard, the alumni magazine. As Hank Reichman’s “Anticipatory…
BY NATHANIEL MILLS It has now been almost a year since then-President Jeff Ettinger of the University of Minnesota intervened to revoke the properly vetted job offer to Raz Segal to serve as faculty director of UMN’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. This decision was denounced by the UMN chapter and national leadership of…
BY JENNIFER RUTH When Jan Haaken and I decided to make The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests?, we couldn’t know how events here—much less in Gaza and the West Bank—would unfold. We had been talking about a film about the suppression of academic freedom in Texas and pivoted when some of the…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH The Coalition for Action in Higher Ed (CAHE) is mobilizing again this year for another Day of Action on April 17. Last year, more than 100 campuses participated in the Day of Action, holding events, rallies, viewing parties for the teach-in, and meetings to strategize. To bring campuses together simultaneously, CAHE…
BY FRANK RITTER ORCID is an ID number authors can request from a consortium, primarily created by for-profit publishers. It is nominally free and intended to be unique to individuals. It is designed to be a database primary key to tie all records of an individual together. Using ORCID is a conflict of interest because…
BY BETHANY LETIECQ, TIM GIBSON, AND JAMES FINKELSTEIN This blog post is the second in a series on the transformation of George Mason University’s board. Read part I here. From Conservative Oversight to Extreme Partisan Activism In recent years, George Mason University’s Board of Visitors (BOV) has dramatically transformed from conservative oversight to extreme partisan…
BY JAMES FINKELSTEIN, BETHANY LETIECQ, AND TIM GIBSON From Conservative Oversight to Extreme Partisan Activism Republican governors in Virginia have long appointed conservatives to university governing boards, but nowhere has this been more pronounced than at George Mason University. This trend began in July 1996, when Governor George Allen appointed Edwin Feulner, co-founder and president…
BY DALE E. MILLER In a recent op-ed in The Hill titled “Our Universities Need Both Free Speech and Diversity Protections to Succeed,” Austin Sarat makes a vital point: “Free speech advocates should welcome . . . efforts to make colleges and universities more diverse and inclusive.” Yet he omits an equally vital point: The…
BY FELICITY JONES The First Reconstruction set us free. Have courage. The Second Reconstruction was meant to let us be. Hope is not lost. The Third Reconstruction is ours to seize. This is your country too. Dear Students of the Third Reconstruction: Changes are happening quickly in federal and state governments across the United States.…
BY ANDREA BROWER A version of this post was also published at Common Dreams. For many months before Trump took office, nearly daily reports rolled in of students and professors on trial for their activism for Palestinian life. NYU suspended eleven students who were part of a peaceful flyer distribution and sit-in, including students who…