BY KEITH E. WHITTINGTON It is not every day that a government minister writes to an American university president demanding that a book be immediately removed “from the curriculum of any of its courses” and that the institution “conduct a thorough review of the academic materials” used in its classes. But such is the demand…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Written by a who’s who of conservative and centrist campus free speech advocates—including Donald Downs, Robert George, Alan Charles Kors, Greg Lukianoff, John Tomasi, and Keith Whittington—the Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry released this month follow in the wake of the Chicago Principles, saying they “affirm this…
BY JOHN A. ETERNO Faculty at many universities are experiencing frustration. Universities should be bastions of creativity, scholarship, and democracy, but administrators have been using a corporate management style which invariably leaves the faculty behind. Most importantly, shared governance, once a staple of higher learning, is becoming a relic of the past. Faculty, to the…
BY MARC STEIN As the academic year begins for California State University, the largest public university system in the United States, it’s a good time to review last year’s faculty-tenure-density report card for the state’s twenty-three campuses. The results—one B, seven Cs, twelve Ds, and three Fs—suggest that CSU administrators might need to work harder…
BY KATHRYN KLEPPINGER AND GWU COLLEAGUES On Friday, August 11, administrators at West Virginia University announced an “academic transformation” that would cut 32 majors and possibly 169 faculty positions across the university, including the entire World Languages Department. Of particular concern to us, as language faculty at The George Washington University, was the misrepresentation of our…
BY JILL R. EHNENN AND CAROLYN BETENSKY Over the past few weeks, three scholars from political science and English departments—Corey Robin (political science, Brooklyn College and CUNY), Ted Underwood (English, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Eleanor Courtemanche (English, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)—have offered incisive and poignant reflections on what ChatGPT means to them, and us,…
BY JAMIE GONZALES The impending closure of the UH LGBTQ Resource Center caused by the passing of Senate Bill 17 weighs heavy on my heart. For those unfamiliar with SB 17, it states that “the governing board of an institution of higher education shall ensure that each unit of the institution: (1) does not, except…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On August 14, the Cornell Free Speech Alliance (CFSA) issued a report, “Lifting The Fog: Restoring Academic Freedom & Free Expression At Cornell University,” that made policy recommendations for how Cornell can improve its climate for free speech. Keith Whittington at Reason called the report “a valuable agenda for faculty across…
BY APARAJITA DE As the sixth poorest state in the nation, West Virginia has always identified a large part of its working-class (primarily) white population as coal miners. With the steady downgrading of coal and related industries, the working class’s only way out of poverty and into alternative livelihoods seemed to be housed in the…
BY JENNIFER RUTH On the August 3 episode of the Progress Texas podcast, guests discussed the recent incidents of political interference at Texas A&M University. One situation involved trustee interference in the hiring of distinguished professor of journalism Kathleen McElroy and the subsequent resignation of President Katherine Banks and the other involved the suspension and…