BY JOHN K. WILSON There have been a lot of evil and stupid bills proposed by state legislators to abolish tenure and destroy academic freedom, but North Dakota’s House Bill 1446 sinks to new depths of depravity in the attacks on higher education. The Tenure with Responsibilities Act, introduced on January 18 by North Dakota…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On March 16, 2021, Boise State University ordered the suspension of fifty-five classes enrolling more than 1,299 students in its required course, UF 200: Foundations of Ethics & Diversity. The mass suspension lasted for eight days, and it is one of the largest targeted suspensions of a course in the history…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS It is not only Colorado’s thousands of higher education faculty who stand to benefit through collective bargaining, but also Colorado’s hundreds of thousands of college students, their parents, and our state’s 5.7 million taxpayers. Why? Because when employers and employees make decisions together through collective bargaining, those negotiations require disclosure of financial…
BY MARTHA MCCAUGHEY At its February 25 meeting, the Wyoming Senate passed a budget amendment to end funding for the University of Wyoming’s Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) program and the activities associated with GWS. The Senate approved the amendment, 16–14, but it did not make it onto the House floor for consideration. The provision’s…
BY HANK REICHMAN Human affairs are filled with contradiction. “Cognitive dissonance,” the mental stress associated with holding two opposing views at the same time, is far from uncommon. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously declared, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still…
BY DALE E. MILLER Several states have taken or are considering measures to prohibit the teaching of “divisive concepts.” In my state, Virginia, new governor Glenn Younkin immediately issued Executive Order Number One (E.O. 1), “Ending the Use of Inherently Divisive Concepts, Including Critical Race Theory, and Restoring Excellence in K–12 Public Education in the…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In a speech in Georgia on Tuesday, President Biden called voter suppression and election subversion “Jim Crow 2.0.” Criticism of the comparison was swift. The “worst hyperbole to date,” an op-ed in Boston Herald called it. Republican Senator Tim Scott* of South Carolina took to the floor to express his irritation and…
BY THOMAS A. BRESLIN Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and his allies have used conflict-of-interest policies meant to keep China from poaching American intellectual property to muzzle Florida’s public college and university professors. So doing, they’ve managed to deny the public access to the expertise of public university and college faculty members, threatened public health, put…
BY PEN AMERICA A wave of alarming legislative efforts to limit teaching and learning on topics including racism, sexism, and American history represent a censorious drive to impose viewpoint and content-based restrictions on freedom of speech and thought in American schools and universities, PEN America said in a report released today. In the report, Educational…
BY ERIC SMAW Recently, the Florida state legislature passed House Bill 233, which requires the state Board of Education and Board of Governors to conduct an annual survey of students and professors at public colleges and universities to determine if they feel comfortable expressing their viewpoints in the classroom. State Rep. Spencer Roach, who sponsored…