BY JOHN K. WILSON California’s Leonard Law, passed in 1992, is unique in the country: It requires private universities to protect some elements of the First Amendment just like a public university. Last month, the Stanford Daily wrote about the Leonard Law controversy on campus, focusing on the Stanford College Republicans and their claim that…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Last year, after DePaul philosophy professor Jason Hill published an anti-Palestinian article that drew protests, I wrote a post titled “In Defense of Jason Hill and His Critics” in which I noted that Hill should not be punished for his offensive right-wing views–but also pointing out that Hill, in fact, hadn’t…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Liberty University has a long history of repression, including suppressing freedom of the press on campus by censoring its student newspaper. But Liberty reached a new low for liberty last week when president Jerry Falwell Jr. announced that the university has issued arrest warrants against two reporters for the crime of…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Rev. Joseph Lowery, known as the “dean” of the Civil Rights Movement, died yesterday at the age of 98. His list of accomplishments bringing justice to America is so long that many obituaries of him have overlooked a key one: He was the last surviving figure from the New York Times…
BY HANK REICHMAN Regular readers of this blog may recall that on March 14 I posted an entry entitled “Online Proctoring and Student Privacy Rights at UCSB.” That post reproduced a letter from the University of California at Santa Barbara Faculty Association (UCSBFA) to campus administrators raising concerns that ProctorU, an online test monitoring service…
BY HANK REICHMAN The AAUP has joined with 18 21 other organizations in a statement released today by PEN America in response to reports that the FBI has urged universities to develop protocols for monitoring students and scholars from Chinese state-affiliated research institutions. The full statement and list of signatories may be found here and…
BY STEVEN LUBET When the University of Alabama returned over $21 million to its largest-ever single donor, and removed his name from its law school, it either was or wasn’t because of his outspoken opposition to the state’s ultra-restrictive new abortion law. According to Hugh Culverhouse, Jr., “the administrators at the university [chose] zealotry over…
BY JOHN K. WILSON This afternoon, Oberlin College was hit by a jury with $33 million in punitive damages added on to the June 7 judgment of $11.2 million for defamation. (The punitive damages will probably be reduced to $22.4 million under state law, but perhaps $10 million in plaintiff legal fees will also be…
BY HANK REICHMAN On May 21, the Department of Education released new data about levels of student debt in various academic programs. Writing in the New York Times, Kevin Carey, who directs the education policy program at New America, suggests that the move is part of the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda. The department is already…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD The following is reposted with permission from the Remaking the University blog. Christopher Newfield is professor of literature and American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. To read his previous post on the cash-for-admission scandals see Bleeding Meritocracy: Responding to the Admissions Scandal as Outrage Fades. The admissions scandal…