Politicized Secret Appointments Fuel Bogus Financial "Crises"

Recently we’ve seen a growing amount of attention paid to secret searches for university presidents and the appointment as a consequence of such searches of non-educators who may push a corporatizing agenda, including at the University of Iowa, Miami University, and the University of North Carolina.  Last week David A. Sanders, Associate Professor of Biological…

CUCFA Letter to UC Regents’ Working Group on Intolerance Policy

Last month the Board of Regents of the University of California system debated a proposed “Statement of Principles on Intolerance” prompted by concerns about anti-Semitism on campus.  The proposal attracted considerable criticism (see also here) and instead the board announced plans to have a task force come up with a new document articulating the system’s…

Ben Carson Is Very Much Opposed to Political Correctness but a Proponent of Campus Censorship of Free Expression

As Tyler Kingkade has illustrated in an  article published yesterday by the Huffington Post, Ben Carson has frequently railed against “political correctness” and, in particular, against the attempts to silence conservative voices of college campuses: For example, Carson compared the U.S. to Nazi Germany last March, before saying, “I know you’re not supposed to say ‘Nazi Germany,’ but…

Steven Salaita Returns to Illinois

Steven Salaita spoke tonight at the University of Illinois at Chicago before a supportive crowd of 150 about his new book, Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom, which Aaron Barlow reviewed and I also reviewed last week. Salaita will be speaking on Oct. 13 in Urbana. He wondered about the controversy that got him fired, “Why was it…

Academic Freedom Is Ultimately Tied to the Right to Vote

Cecil Canton, my colleague on the CBC Executive Committee, has passed along this “Weekly Commentary” from Jesse Jackson, Sr., about the erosion of voting rights in Alabama. Very ironically but very predictably, once the Supreme Court ruled that the states subject to federal monitoring under the Voting Rights Act had moved beyond the need for…

Why Freedom of Expression Isn't a Dangerous Mistake

At Minding the Campus, National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood calls the adoption by other colleges of the University of Chicago statement on freedom of expression “a dangerous mistake.” It is always dangerous when extremists imagine that freedom of expression must not be applied to their enemies, and that’s exactly what Wood does. Wood…

LSU Senate Replies to Administration

Late yesterday I posted news that the Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge Faculty Senate had voted by an overwhelming 39-5 margin to censure LSU Chancellor-President F. King Alexander and two other top administrators for their roles in the dismissal of tenured professor Teresa Buchanan.  The LSU administration responded with the following press release, issued…