BY JOHN K. WILSON The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has issued a new report today, “Campus Free Speech, Academic Freedom, and the Problem of the BDS Movement.” It opens with a preposterous claim: “One of the greatest threats to academic freedom in the United States today is the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.”…
BY RENATA KOBETTS MILLER Guest blogger Renata Kobetts Miller is an associate professor of English at the City College of New York, where she teaches Victorian literature. She recently concluded being chair of her department, and this summer she will become deputy dean of Humanities and the Arts. As a working mother, she reflects here on…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is the latest report from UnKoch My Campus. Although it does not entirely align with other recent discussions of this topic posted to this blog, I think that it contributes some new elements and details to that discussion: In the past month, state lawmakers across the country coordinated an…
BY STEVE MUMME This guest post is by Steve Mumme of the Colorado Conference. Knowledgeable observers of the higher education landscape will have noticed the dilemma that university presidents now suffer in the face of the Trump administration’s recent executive orders banning travel from seven predominantly Muslim nations. The U.S. President’s discriminatory hard line on…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Last week, an ad hoc committee of the Northwestern University faculty senate issued a report (pdf) addressing the cases of Laura Kipnis and the censorship of Atrium magazine. Kipnis, who was accused of retaliation for writing about a sexual harassment case on campus, has written a book about her experience, Unwanted…
BY MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ Guest blogger Michael Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University and a member of the AAUP Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. He is past president of the Modern Language Association. He first published this post on his Facebook page; it is reposted here with his kind…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Some links to resources of possible interest: Women’s History Month; National Women’s History Project; New York Times Learning Network: Celebrate Women’s History Month; Smithsonian Education: Women’s History Teaching Resources; Science NetLinks: Women’s History Month; National Education Association: Women’s History Month in the Classroom;
BY MARTIN KICH Here is another item to put in the folder of false assertions about how Federal tax policy screws the wealthy and exists to provide giveaways to the impoverished. In reporting on an Issue Brief produced by the Pew Research Center, the Hechinger Report highlights the widening gap between the value of Federal…
![By Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://i0.wp.com/academeblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/charles_murray_2013_freedomfest.jpeg?resize=220%2C126&ssl=1)
BY AARON BARLOW Charles Murray is a complicated figure. A Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV), he married into a wealthy Thai family and spent time in the countryside as a PCV there during the 1960s. That type of experience, as any RPCV can tell you (as I can tell you), is formative. Immersion into another…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Shouting down speakers, such as the recent suppression of Charles Murray’s speech at Middlebury College by a large crowd of protesters, is wrong. Plain and simple. It’s wrong. Shouting down speakers is morally wrong, unprincipled, anti-intellectual, and utterly indefensible. For a long time, I thought this was an obvious position, but…