BY HANK REICHMAN The right-wing’s embrace of campus free speech has always seemed, well, more than a little hypocritical. The outrage machine kicks into high gear when invited speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro, or Charles Murray are protested or disinvited. But what about when the speaker is someone these vocal free speech…
BY HANK REICHMAN On March 21, 2019, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that he claimed would require colleges and universities to uphold free speech or risk forfeiting federal support. When Trump first announced his intent to issue the order at the Conservative Political Action Conference the AAUP and eleven other groups issued a…
BY JOAN WALLACH SCOTT Joan Wallach Scott is Professor Emerita of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and a member of AAUP Committee A. These remarks were delivered at a panel on “Academic Freedom and the Historical Profession” at the annual conference of the American Historical Association in New York on January 6. …
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following are excerpts from an article on the website of Reason magazine. To read the full piece go here. A vocational college in La Crosse, Wisconsin, spent more than $100,000 investigating one of its instructors for allegedly saying the local police department was “full of racists.” The school is Western…
BY AARON BARLOW At one point in North by Northwest, Leo G. Carroll’s character The Professor says “It’s so horribly sad. Why is it I feel like laughing?” Of course, he isn’t really a professor but is an intelligence agent. But this professor had exactly that reaction this morning on reading in The Guardian about…
BY AARON BARLOW My colleague on this blog, and one of its founding editors, John K. Wilson, objects to my advocacy of gatekeeping at colleges and universities on free-speech grounds. A decade ago, I would have agreed with him. Now, I do not. Wilson has been consistent; I have not. Part of this is that…
BY HANK REICHMAN So now it’s come to burning books! The following account comes from The George-Anne, an independent student newspaper at Georgia Southern University, in Statesboro, Georgia: Students at Georgia Southern University burned a book, written by a New York Times contributor, after a Q&A session at her lecture became heated. Jennine Capó Crucet…
BY AARON BARLOW On Thursday evening, October 10, former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker will interview former Vice President Dick Cheney at Beloit College’s Eaton Chapel. I once knew the place well, having graduated from the college getting close to fifty years ago. Alumni like me, as well as a number of current students and faculty,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Despite the presence of the verb “ban” in my headline, this post does not uncover yet another censorious outrage committed by a university administration — well, at least not a very major one. Still, a recent decision by the administration of Columbia University to prohibit its university marching band from performing at…