Did Clemson Activists Demand the University “Prosecute Criminally” Free Speech? No, But They’re Still Wrong

Recently, news about a set of demands by activist students at Clemson University concerned about racism and intolerance spread like wildfire across the internet when a group of 110 faculty and staff published a letter in the student newspaper endorsing those demands. These students and faculty were accused by various conservative websites of wanting to…

Neil Postman Always Rings Twice

After my mother died, in cleaning out her house I went through my father’s old books, pulling out the ones that I might find of use in my own writing and teaching. Among those was a dusty paperback of Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s 1969 Teaching as a Subversive Activity. I returned to it recently, remembering it from…

Teaching Race Against Racism

By Bill V. Mullen Arizona State Ethnic Studies Professor Lee Bebout is under attack by a white supremacist group called the “National Youth Front” for teaching a course at his University called “U.S. Race Theory and the Problem of Whiteness.” Lee was my student at Purdue University, where he earned his Ph.D in American Studies.…

Neologisms from the "Blizzard of 2015"

Bombogenesis: a scientific term that the Weather Channel has popularized because it combines suggestions of the destructive power of heavy ordinance and associations with the Biblical story of the origins of life—that is, it suggests re-creation out of the maelstrom. Here is the explanation from the Weather Channel’s website: “Bombogenesis. The word sounds ominous, but…

The Gates Foundation Profiles American College Students

The following infographic was produced by designer Eleanor Lutz and journalist Linda Kennedy for the Gates Foundation. It has been publicized under the lead “If There Were Only 100 College Students in America,” but it basically presents percentages rounded to the closest integer. The sources of the statistics in each category are indicated on the…

The Troubling Case of Professor Stephen Cohen and the American Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

Recently considerable attention has been paid on this blog and elsewhere to potential threats to academic freedom posed by the undue influence of outside donors on scholarship.  One thinks immediately, of course, of efforts by the Koch brothers at Florida State and elsewhere to fund academic positions that reflect their personal ideology and of the…

University of Illinois Responds to Salaita Lawsuit

In response to Steven Salaita’s lawsuit yesterday, the University of Illinois administration issued a statement (copied in full below). Many claims in the U of I statement are incorrect, and others seem to confess to precisely the punishment of political speech that Salaita’s lawsuit is based upon. The U of I statement claims that Salaita’s tweets…

Salaita Legal Team Stands Tall as They Fight for Justice in US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois

I would like to add a few items to John Wilson’s fine summary of the law suit filed in US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois on behalf of Steven Salaita. The Center for Constitutional Law and the Chicago civil rights law firm Loevy and Loevy have been providing legal counsel to Professor Salaita. The…