POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN In the ongoing discussions over the relationship between free speech and academic freedom and debates over the rights of outside speakers versus those of student protesters, an article published yesterday in Times Higher Education makes some excellent points. The author, George Letsas, a philosophy professor at University College London, writes in…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday, Kent Syverud, Chancellor and President of Syracuse University, and David Van Slyke, Dean of that institution’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, issued a statement in response to controversy that had emerged around a faculty member’s comments about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The faculty member, a tenure-track assistant…
BY THE AAUP The AAUP issued the following statement today. In an ostensible effort to protect “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” on public college and university campuses, the Florida legislature has approved legislation that, like similar proposals this year in Iowa and elsewhere, amounts to what the AAUP has repeatedly described as a “solution in…
BY HANK REICHMAN The AAUP issued the following statement today. Three proposals currently under consideration by the Iowa Legislature raise troubling concerns about academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus. One bill would end tenure for professors at the state’s three public universities. Tenure provides that after a suitable probationary period a faculty member…
BY JOAN W. SCOTT Gender studies is under siege in many places and not just by authoritarian regimes in Poland, Hungary, and Brazil. Some universities looking to gain control over relatively autonomous programs are replacing feminist stalwarts with their own directors, whom they count on to adhere to corporate strategies of fund-raising and “outreach.” In…
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…
BY HANK REICHMAN As we today observe a Juneteenth holiday, celebrating the end of slavery in its final redoubt of Texas on June 19, 1865, a commemoration that has gained extra salience and expanded recognition in the context of the extraordinary and continuing cross-racial upsurge of the Black Lives Matter movement, those in higher education…
BY JOAN WALLACH SCOTT Joan Wallach Scott is Professor Emerita of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and a member of AAUP Committee A. These remarks were delivered at a panel on “Academic Freedom and the Historical Profession” at the annual conference of the American Historical Association in New York on January 6. …
BY AARON BARLOW My colleague on this blog, and one of its founding editors, John K. Wilson, objects to my advocacy of gatekeeping at colleges and universities on free-speech grounds. A decade ago, I would have agreed with him. Now, I do not. Wilson has been consistent; I have not. Part of this is that…
BY HANK REICHMAN When I saw the headline this morning on Inside Higher Ed, “Another Speaker Unable to Appear at Middlebury,” I immediately thought, “Haven’t those students learned that shutting down speakers is not only wrong but counter-productive?” Two years ago Middlebury students famously shouted down conservative speaker Charles Murray and a faculty member was…