Stanford and the Legacy of the Leonard Law
BY JOHN K. WILSON California’s Leonard Law, passed in 1992, is unique in the country: It requires private universities to protect some elements of the First Amendment just like a public university. Last month, the Stanford Daily wrote about the Leonard Law controversy on campus, focusing on the Stanford College Republicans and their claim that…
The Culture of Molloy
BY MARK S. JAMES This blog post originally appeared on the Molloy College AAUP chapter website. We are reposting it here with the author’s permission. Dear Colleagues, I am a black man in America. I grew up in a white family that didn’t want to talk about race. Yet race was everywhere. The dangers of…
Turning Point Weighs In on the Crisis
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the University of Wisconsin at Madison began instruction online, a move that the great majority of colleges and universities have made or are making in response to the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s what English professor Caroline Gottschalk Druschke told the Wisconsin State Journal about the move: “None of us are going…
Sad… But Funny
BY AARON BARLOW At one point in North by Northwest, Leo G. Carroll’s character The Professor says “It’s so horribly sad. Why is it I feel like laughing?” Of course, he isn’t really a professor but is an intelligence agent. But this professor had exactly that reaction this morning on reading in The Guardian about…
Scholarship is Global; Academic Freedom Should Be Too
BY HANK REICHMAN When I began work earlier this year on guest-editing the new issue of Academe devoted to “academic freedom around the world,” I was motivated by the recognition that, as I put it in the editor’s note, “Scholarship today is global” and “threats to scholarship outside the United States inevitably affect scholarship here.” …
Are You on a Blacklist?
BY FRANK BALDWIN The Hollywood Ten knew they were on a blacklist. The House Un-American Activities Committee held televised hearings to vilify screenwriters and other cinema professionals and cited them for contempt of Congress. Studio executives fired the group in a press release, a warning to the film industry that subversives were not employable. Public…
Bolsonaro Attacks Science
BY HANK REICHMAN In April I posted to this blog an item, “‘Professor Watchlist’ Goes International,” which reported, among other things, that a member of parliament from right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s party had called on students to send her videos of instructors “indoctrinating” them into leftist ideologies and that Bolsonaro himself shared one such…
Responding to Conservative Watchdogs
BY MATTHEW BOEDY When some conservative media outlet contacts you, with a picture of a lecture slide or assignment from your course, implying a bias against their conservative agenda, do you respond? If so, how? I am not imagining a hypothetical scenario. The headlines of conservative websites such as Campus Reform and College Fix suggest…
The Perfectly Incoherent Trumpism of Charlie Kirk’s Campus Battlefield
BY SIMON MALOY The following review of Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can Win the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA and creator of the notorious Professor Watchlist, is reposted with permission from Media Matters. Simon Maloy is a senior writer at Media Matters. Formerly a political writer…