BY CORY JAMES YOUNG I was having a conversation with a graduate student in my department about a possible collaboration when we noticed the television. One of our colleagues was on the Iowa City news providing historical context about the ongoing crisis in Palestine and Israel. Then, even more unexpectedly, a student from my previous…
BY HANK REICHMAN The so-called “heckler’s veto” is much in the higher ed news these days, with Inside Higher Ed this week running a piece, “Shouting Down Speakers Who Offend,” focusing on incidents at SUNY Albany, Stanford, and San Francisco State Universities. The Stanford incident has prompted two prior posts to this blog (here and here).…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN This blog has regularly posted items in support of faculty and students resisting attacks on academic freedom at universities in Turkey (see, for examples, here, here, and here; see also from Academe magazine, Fall 2019, here). Now Turkish universities are facing another crisis: the aftermath of the devastating earthquakes that hit…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF Growing up was always hard to do. It’s getting harder, and universities now are doing little to help the new “lost generation.” Experts on children, youth, and college students never tire of superficial generalizations about the ease or difficulty of growing up over time. They seldom define terms, specify ages, present…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF We live in a new age of division. Universities are so often centers of differences, contradictions, and clashes between knowledge and ignorance. One revealing site is the false opposition of the faculty and the—to faculty and academic administration—second-class “professionals” in departments of student affairs and student life. Critically, this dichotomy parallels…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Fifty years ago, on June 26, 1972, the US Supreme Court issued one of the most important rulings protecting free speech on campus in the case of Healy v. James. As the conservative Supreme Court has proven this week, even a fifty-year precedent is not safe if five justices decide to…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Yesterday, I published an opinion essay at Inside Higher Ed titled, “The Inevitable Problem of Self-Censorship.” I argue that surveys showing that a majority of college students report self-censorship are not meaningful ways to understand repression on campus because everyone self-censors to some degree. These surveys are also easy to manipulate.…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Michael Hobbes, a journalist based in Berlin, has a substack site, “Confirm My Choices,” where he regularly posts commentary on a variety of topics. Today he posted a piece, “Lies, Damn Lies and ‘Self-Censorship’ Statistics,” that really hit the nail on the head about the much-ballyhooed “Campus Free Speech Crisis.” I’m…
BY MARTHA MCCAUGHEY AND SCOTT WELSH In the fall 2021 issue of Academe we describe the problem of a “shadow curriculum” in the form of student-affairs programming that (re)shapes students’ education on campus, encroaching on the faculty’s role in governance of courses and curriculum. From our perspective as faculty members guided by AAUP principles, such…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted to this blog a statement from Stanford University students, faculty and alums that called out the Stanford College Republicans (SCR) for instigating the widely publicized and controversial firing of a recent Stanford graduate by the Associated Press because of social media posts she had made that were pro-Palestinian. …