BY JONATHAN REES Did you know that Donald Trump has promised to create a free national online university if he gets to become president again? You can read the basics of his proposal in Politico: Donald Trump wants to “revolutionize” higher education if elected president. And in a new campaign policy video, he is pledging…
BY KEVIN HOWLEY In recent weeks, college students across the country have raised their voices in support of the Palestinian people, whose collective punishment at the hands of the Israeli government and their enablers in the United States and across Western Europe is both shameful and horrific. For conservative culture warriors, pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college…
BY CORY JAMES YOUNG I was having a conversation with a graduate student in my department about a possible collaboration when we noticed the television. One of our colleagues was on the Iowa City news providing historical context about the ongoing crisis in Palestine and Israel. Then, even more unexpectedly, a student from my previous…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY I was asked by our state’s largest newspaper here in Georgia to write a column offering some priorities for higher education as lawmakers return in January for our annual legislative session. You can likely guess my priorities. Bigger budgets, better salary, and stopping culture war attacks on higher education. But those priorities…
BY RUBÉN MARTINEZ Crises in intellectual and religious thought have been opportunities for the reformulation of the basic principles and ideas of existing bodies of knowledge for decades. In the 1920s and 1930s, legal realism raised the specter of the destructive character of accepted theories of law. In the 1960s, Vatican II, the twenty-first Roman…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Last Friday, the administration of Indiana University decided to delay seeking trustee approval of a plan announced just two weeks earlier to move its Kinsey Institute to a separate nonprofit organization. The plan, made in response to legislators requiring a ban on all state funds to the Kinsey Institute because of…
BY DANIEL A. SEGAL The assault on academic freedom and campus-speech rights for pro-Palestinian students and faculty has been so fast and furious in the wake of October 7 that one hardly knows where to begin. Indeed, even to write that simple—even obvious—sentence feels risky: a voice in my head asks, Can I write that…
POSTED BY THE AAUP We are pleased to announce the publication of volume 14 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. Our call for papers, “Landscapes of Power and Academic Freedom,” invited scholarly articles investigating the links between social power and the historical development and contemporary status of academic freedom. Seeking submissions that would build on…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday’s election results in Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and elsewhere have boosted the spirits of Democrats and progressives. One of the less widely publicized results, however, has been the stunning rebuke suffered by book-banners and transphobes like Moms for Liberty in school board elections in Iowa and elsewhere. In the past, Iowa school…
BY JENNIFER RUTH The situation in the Middle East demands the best of all of us. Yet so many capitalize on the moment to harness the conflict to their own domestic “culture wars” agenda. Typical are op-eds like this one, arguing that contextualization, when in support of Palestinian refugees, amounts to little more than illiberal…