BY TIM McGETTIGAN Tim McGettigan is Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University, Pueblo. It has required nearly four years and humongous legal costs, but I can finally say that I have won my First Amendment battle against Colorado State University. Four years ago, the CSU Board of Governors, former CSU Chancellor Michael Martin and…
BY HANK REICHMAN Fresh from the embarrassment of rescinding a fellowship to whistleblower Chelsea Manning while welcoming disgraced Trumpers Corey Lewandowski and Sean Spicer, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has again privileged spokespersons for the right while denying their opponents a voice. Thursday and Friday the school will host a conference on “The Future of…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and its implementing regulations, an institution that receives federal funds must ensure that no student suffers a deprivation of her or his access to educational opportunities on the basis of sex. The Department of Education intends to engage in rulemaking on the…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In a short piece for the New Yorker, Daniel A. Gross quotes extensively from a prisoner’s account of what it has been like to experience Harvey from inside a maximum-security cell in a prison in the severely affected region of Texas. Here are the opening paragraphs that provide a context for…
BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN This week, the Defenders of Civil Rights called on the UNC Law School administration and faculty to make the Center for Civil Rights a clinical project of the law school, to ensure that the community lawyering performed with and for low-wealth communities of color will continue. On Friday, the UNC Board of Governors…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The first item is an article written by Frederick M. Hess and Grant Addison for the National Review. Titled “DeVos Moves to Reign in the Campus Kangaroo Courts” and sub-titled “Her Fine Speech and Pledge to Act Are Worth Commending,” the article opens with the following paragraphs: In an anticipated speech…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following is the text of the speech posted on the Department of Education website. Thank you Dean Henry Butler for the kind introduction and for the opportunity to be here. Thank you President Angel Cabrera for your leadership of George Mason University. And to the students and faculty with…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for IndyWeek, which serves the Research Triangle region of North Carolina, Erica Hellerstein reports: After months of contentious back-and-forth, the UNC Board of Governors voted this morning [Friday, September 8] to ban the UNC Center for Civil Rights from doing legal work on behalf of the state’s poor and minority…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN In response to President Donald Trump’s decision to eliminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) president Rudy Fichtenbaum issued the following statement. The American Association of University Professors denounces in the strongest possible terms the decision by the Trump administration to end…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH All language is an inexact effort to reference and communicate aspects of reality, and ultimately, even the most seemingly straightforward statement can be shown to have ambiguous possibilities. That said, human society depends on language to function, and as this account of a judicial ruling makes clear, making unusual efforts to…