POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Readers of this blog may recall that shortly after the vice-presidential debate history professor Lora Burnett was hounded by trolls for Twitter comments that referred to Vice-President Pence as a “demon” and that her college administration buckled under the pressure to denounce her in a notorious October 12 statement. I blogged…
BY HANK REICHMAN Historian Lora Burnett has been completing a book on the culture wars and the conflict over “western civilization.” She never thought she would have to add a chapter to her book about her own experiences as a professor. Until yesterday. Burnett, who goes by L.D. Burnett on Twitter where she has over…
BY JOHN K. WILSON This week the College Free Speech Survey was released, which was developed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the conservative website RealClearEducation, and the research firm College Pulse, and funded by the Charles Koch Institute. It is being marketed as the largest survey ever conducted of students about…
BY JOHN K. WiLSON Tony Woodlief in the Wall Street Journal on Aug. 30 offered a conservative critique of free speech absolutism, claiming that “the intolerance prevailing on college campuses isn’t the result of too little speech. It’s a consequence of too much speech.” Woodlief represents a disturbing trend on the right, where a sneer…
BY JOHN K. WILSON If anyone thinks freedom of the press is safe on college campuses, two stories this week from FIRE suggest otherwise. At the University of North Texas, a right-wing nonprofit group called Empower Texas filed a Freedom of Information Act request, demanding that the university force its student newspaper to turn over…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Pippa Norris of Harvard has an interesting new paper on the views of political scientists globally, “Closed minds? Is a ‘cancel culture’ stifling academic freedom and intellectual debate in political science?” It’s based on a global survey of political science professors, World of Political Science, 2019, in which scholars were asked:…
BY JOHN K. WILSON I have written a new study about freedom of the press on campus that has been released today, a product of my 2019–20 fellowship with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. The study includes a survey of policies for professional media at the top twenty-five…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Bari Weiss is a coward. That claim may seem incredible to those who have read the fulsome praise from conservatives about Weiss’ decision last week to quit her job as an op-ed editor and writer at the New York Times, and her open resignation letter. Newt Gingrich tweeted, “Bari Weiss’s Letter…
BY RACHEL IDA BUFF Last week, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee students organized a Peaceful Protest Against Professor Betsey Schoeller. On a warm summer evening, the event drew about 250 people, most of them young, many of them people of color. Most wore masks and stood in small clusters around Spaights Plaza, a gathering place in the…