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…

A History and Defense of Tenure

Sol Gittleman, the Alice and Nathan Gantcher University Professor at Tufts University, has been a professor of German, Judaic studies and biblical literature and is a former provost of Tufts.  In an article that first appeared in the Summer 2015 issue of Tufts Magazine, and is now available on the web under the title “Tenure:…

Among School Children: A Review of Steven Salaita’s "Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom"

This is the second of our reviews of this book. The first one, published earlier today, can be found here. From dead infants in Gaza to Israeli students killed on the West Bank, from fragile undergraduates to childish administrators and trustees, from his own early years to the those of his son, Steven Salaita, in…