BY WENDY LYNNE LEE There is a great deal to be said about the rise of the Alt-Right over this past year, and while I understand the argument for identifying its platform with the ascent of white supremacism, I’d argue that “Alt-Right” encompasses something far more ambitious and dangerous, especially with respect to the country’s…
BY HANK REICHMAN Readers of this blog have probably already heard how the Trump administration has barred officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from using a list of seven words or phrases in official documents being prepared for next year’s budget. According to the Washington Post, policy analysts were told of…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL It’s hard to imagine how deeply the policies of the Trump Administration will affect America’s colleges and universities. As a group, these institutions are already undergoing substantial disruption. The old financial models under which most higher education institutions operate no longer work. The current path for many of them is not…
BY HANK REICHMAN Tennessee, North Carolina, and Wisconsin have already enacted comprehensive new campus speech laws based on model legislation proposed by the Goldwater Institute, which in critical respects defend free speech by attacking it. (I discussed this legislation previously in a section of one of my lengthy posts on outside speakers, under the subtitle…
BY HANK REICHMAN This summer the North Carolina Restore Campus Free Speech Act, passed earlier in the year by the state legislature, went into effect. Directly inspired by a proposal by the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank, the legislation’s premise is that free speech is under attack on American campuses. Among other provisions, the…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Judith Butler’s essay, “The Limits on Free Speech,” has attracted a great deal of attention and numerous comments. Because it deserves a more extensive response than I could make in a comment, I wanted to offer this in-depth reply. I think Butler makes two fundamental errors in her analysis. First, she…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The AAUP has joined with 36 other higher education organizations in urging Congress to slow down its reauthorization of the Higher Education Act to allow the consequences of its provisions to be understood and revised as necessary. After several years of inaction, the bill is suddenly being rushed through committee with…
BY AARON BARLOW In the November 2017 issue of Australian Humanities Review, in an article entitled “The Roz Ward Case: Relections on Social Media, University Management and Free Speech,” Binoy Kampmark, a a Senior Lecturer in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, writes of the situation of…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On Friday, Rutgers University demoted professor Michael Chikindas, banned him from teaching any required classes, and announced they would seek to suspend him for a semester, all because of his anti-Semitic comments on his personal social media. Based on his posts, I think Chikindas is an anti-Semite, and an idiot. Nevertheless,…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is excerpted from a December 7 article on the website of the Index on Censorship. A group of court reporters scurried along the halls of Istanbul’s massive Çağlayan Courthouse on the morning of 7 December, taking pictures of the tables showing the trial schedules of several high criminal courts…