BY JOHN K. WILSON DePaul University has banned conservative pundit Ben Shapiro from speaking on campus to the Young Americans for Freedom student group. Bob Janis, Vice President of Facilities Operations at DePaul, sent an email declaring, “Given the experiences and security concerns that some other schools have had with Ben Shapiro speaking on their…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the Fall of 2014 I posted several entries to this blog (see here, here, and here) suggesting that “recent attempts to enforce standards of ‘civility’ at colleges and universities, often . . . in response to pro-Palestinian expression, recalled previous efforts in the 1940s and 1950s to exclude alleged communists from…
BY HANK REICHMAN I am old enough to remember August 1, 1966 — fifty years ago today — when a mentally disturbed ex-marine, Charles Whitman, climbed to the top of the tower at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) with an arsenal of high-powered weapons and began shooting. For 96 terrifying minutes, Whitman fired…
BY MARTIN KICH Let’s not beat around the bush. For the sake of argument, let’s accept that all politicians are full of shit. Why is a guy who is so patently full of shit—who repeatedly says things on camera and then very shortly afterwards denies that he said them (just today, he said that John…
BY MARTIN KICH Not all stories are big stories, but sometimes the small stories are illustrative in ways that bigger stories cannot be because as the scope of a story becomes narrower, the implications can be seen in a more personalized way. In the Music Department at Pacific Lutheran University, changes have been proposed that,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH These are the opening paragraphs of an article written by Elizabeth Campbell for Bloomberg News, titled “Illinois Colleges Besieged by Cuts as Budget Battle Trickles Down”: “For Illinois’s colleges and universities, the end of a record-long political fight over the budget isn’t bringing the financial consequences to a close. “Southern Illinois…
BY JOERG TIEDE Walter P. Metzger, professor of history at Columbia University for his entire career and the AAUP’s official historian for most of that time, has passed away. Professor Metzger dedicated his entire professional life to the AAUP, both by contributing to the ongoing work of the Association, in particular on Committee A on Academic Freedom…
BY MICHAEL DECESARE On Thursday, I posted Michael Bérubé’s and Jennifer Ruth’s rejoinder to Maria Maisto’s and Seth Kahn’s review of their book The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments (Academe, May-June 2016, 47-50). Below is Maisto’s and Kahn’s response to Bérubé’s and Ruth’s rejoinder. Please continue this important conversation in the Comments section at the bottom of the page.…
POSTED BY HENRY REICHMAN The following is the text of a letter signed by 114 members of the faculty at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs in response to a campaign appearance at the university by Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump. July 28, 2016 Dear Chancellor Pam Shockley-Zalabak, With the pending visit of the Republican nominee…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH I have not been able to find the original YELP-produced results, but the results have been reported by Ana Swanson in an article for the Washington Post [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/27/the-strange-and-wonderful-things-people-search-for-during-the-republican-and-democratic-conventions/] and by Brittany Kriegstein in an article for Business Insider [http://www.businessinsider.com/difference-between-rnc-and-dnc-on-yelp-2016-7?utm].