POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Today, August 7, marks the third anniversary of the detention in Iran of Princeton University graduate student Xiyue Wang. Wang, a Chinese-born naturalized U.S.citizen who previously worked as a translator in Central Asia, was conducting doctoral research on Iran’s Qajar dynasty that ruled from 1785 to 1925 when he was arrested…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH A post I wrote on the massacre in El Paso was removed from the blog because it did not have anything specific to do with higher education. And at a certain level, that decision was justifiable because the blog is about topics and issues related to higher education, and it is…
BY AARON BARLOW Yale is not college. What goes on there has little relevance to life on the majority of American campuses. Pundits across the country who write on education need to put this on little notecards and place them by their bedsides so that they can read them when they wake each morning. That…
BY JONATHAN REES Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo and a member of the AAUP Council. The following is reposted from his “More or Less Bunk” blog. This morning [August 1], I delivered this paper in the Academic Freedom session at the West Coast Division of the American Historical…
BY AARON BARLOW One of the latest fads at the City University of New York is the “interdisciplinary” course. It has become, on many campuses, a requirement for graduation and a plum atop administrative fruit baskets. To me, it always seemed so much window dressing, something to impress the flaneurs but offering little in the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday Princeton political scientist and legal scholar Keith Whittington posted to this blog a piece entitled “Academic Freedom, Even for Amy Wax.” Wax is a University of Pennsylvania law professor whose extramural expression, most recently at the pro-Trump National Conservatism Conference, has been widely condemned as intolerant and racist. More than 1,000…
Guest blogger Keith E. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University and the author of Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech. Amy Wax, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, has once again annoyed her colleagues and students and provoked calls for her prompt dismissal. It…
BY AARON BARLOW Is Liberty University the future of the American university? Most of us have dismissed Liberty as an outlier. Though an accredited university, Liberty’s focus has always been education through religion rather than, as traditional American religious colleges and universities have it, religion through education. Its leaders have not the confidence in their…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Yesterday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued an important decision for freedom of the press and free speech on campus in The Koala v. Khosla, reversing a deeply mistaken lower court ruling. The 9th Circuit ruled that a public university cannot ban funding to student publications, particularly not in reaction…
BY JOAN W. SCOTT Adalah, the Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, reports that the Israeli government “is refusing to issue work permits for international academics working at Palestinian universities in the occupied West Bank and is escalating a harsh visa policy that is forcing them to abandon their students and leave the country.…