BY MARCO ABEL AND JULIA SCHLECK In our recent Academe article, “Academic Freedom, Radical Hospitality, and the Necessity of Counterspeech,” we revisit the incident on UNL’s campus that led to its censure last June to ask what administrations can do when faced with incidents like this one, in which a student advocating for the establishment…
POSTED BY KELLY HAND Winter 2019 | Vol. 105, No. 1 This issue of Academe addresses the questions of speech that have fueled the culture wars on college campuses in recent years. Articles discuss the assault on the public mission of higher education; the implications of a polarized political climate for faculty members, administrators, and students; and…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office agreed to drop all criminal charges against Melina Abdullah, a professor and chair of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles and an activist in the AAUP-affiliated California Faculty Association. Prof. Abdullah, a prominent Black Lives Matter leader, faced charges of assaulting a police…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at New York University, and Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), have written a new book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Haidt and…
BY HANK REICHMAN Recently a minor brouhaha has emerged over the “Chicago Principles,” shorthand for the University of Chicago’s 2015 “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression.” The Principles have been endorsed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and several dozen universities, but dismissed as a “marketing ploy” by others. Then,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of laws that require government contractors to disavow a boycott of Israel seem to be proliferating — and that’s a good thing. A week ago I posted about a challenge to such a law in Arkansas by a newspaper barred from running advertising from a state university if…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a statement released yesterday by the Canadian Association of University Teachers. The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) is giving a failing grade to a free speech policy developed by Ontario’s colleges without any consultation with faculty. “The colleges’ so-called free speech statement is a classic…
BY SUSAN E. RAMLO Now in my twenty-fifth year of teaching at a public urban university in the Midwest, I research subjective viewpoints mainly using a somewhat obscure, eighty-year-old methodology that has been gaining popularity. Q methodology (Q) is unique in its ability to scientifically study divergent viewpoints in a way that distinguishes and describes…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted a piece on this blog reporting on a legal challenge filed by the Arkansas Times against a state law requiring government contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel. Now a similar law is being challenged in Texas by a children’s speech pathologist who has worked for the last…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week The Atlantic magazine announced a year-long reporting project, “The Speech Wars,” exploring questions of American free expression and public discourse. It is funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Fetzer Institute. According to the magazine, “The project will unfold across TheAtlantic.com,…