MICHAEL C. BEHRENT The bold print of UNC-Chapel Hill’s decision earlier this week to build a $5.3 million museum for “Silent Sam,” the controversial Confederate statue, was bad enough. But as people have had time to read the report released by the campus’s Board of Trustees on Monday, December 3, it has become apparent that…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH American journalists are rightly concerned about President Trump’s almost continuous attacks on the press in general and on individual journalists. For although the freedom of the press is very easy to take for granted, it is very difficult to restore once it has been lost. The Washington Post’s editorial board reminds…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Last week, the Nassau Community College Board of Trustees unanimously approved a new News Media Relations policy that is a tremendous victory for freedom of the press, reflecting the importance of the AAUP and other groups fighting for campus liberty. At the Nov. 13 Board meeting, President W. Hubert Keen declared, “We’ve…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following is from Politico’s Morning Education daily newsletter: RUTGERS REVERSES RULING ON CONTROVERSIAL FACEBOOK POSTS : After being accused of caving to an “internet mob,” Rutgers University has reversed a ruling that history professor James Livingston was guilty of violating its anti-harassment policy when he wrote posts on Facebook complaining about…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following two stories illustrate the complexity of free-speech issues on campus. For although it would be tempting to frame each case as a conflict between the free expression of religious values and the insistence on political correctness, the real issue, it seems to me, is whether it is appropriate for…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Today the writers’ organization PEN America, represented by the nonpartisan nonprofit Protect Democracy and the Yale Law School Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against President Donald Trump. The suit seeks to stop President Trump from using…
BY SIMON MALOY The following review of Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can Win the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA and creator of the notorious Professor Watchlist, is reposted with permission from Media Matters. Simon Maloy is a senior writer at Media Matters. Formerly a political writer…
BY RESHMI DUTT-BALLERSTADT We find ourselves living in a precarious space and time within our institutions where suddenly there has been a resurgence in appeals to civility codes (that perhaps started with Steven Salaita’s firing from University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, in August 2014 as a result of his tweets). Following the election of Donald…
BY LEAH P. HOLLIS My Journal of Academic Freedom article “The Ironic Interplay of Free Speech and Silencing discusses academic freedom in the context of workplace bullying. In it, I consider the need to balance free speech rights with an individual’s right to a psychologically safe workplace. During my campus visits and talks about workplace…
BY JAIME WEIDA I have a confession to make: along with being an English professor, I am a huge science fiction nerd. While I spend my time online reading articles and news from the websites for the MLA, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the American Federation of Teachers, and—of course—the AAUP, I also spend an…