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.…
BY HANK REICHMAN In April I was privileged to appear on a program on academic freedom at New York University with Matthew Hedges and his wife, Daniela Tejada, sponsored by NYU’s AAUP chapter. Hedges is a British scholar who was held in solitary confinement in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for almost six months after…
BY HANK REICHMAN On July 11 I had the privilege of being a guest on Bryan Alexander’s “Future Trends Forum,” an online discussion venue focused in part on higher education issues. If you aren’t familiar with the forum or Bryan’s excellent work, you should check it out here. My session, which lasts about an hour,…
BY AARON BARLOW “Can I let you know? Why must I hesitate?” –Reverend Gary Davis Though I like the resolution passed by the House of Representatives condemning Trump’s tweets, maybe there’s something to be said for hesitating, for delaying a bit. The Democrats, though they did the right thing, walked right into Trump’s trap. For…
BY GALEN LEONHARDY Guest Blogger Galen Leonhardy teaches English and humanities classes at Black Hawk College in Moline, Illinois. On Sunday and Monday, President Trump, offered tweeted comments we need to contemplate. On Sunday, he pointed out that minority representatives he claimed were from foreign countries should return to the places from which they…