Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times is one of my favorite newspaper columnists. This week he ran an excellent piece on what I’ve started calling the emerging “civility doctrine” in higher education. Here are some excerpts: When someone in power praises the principle of free speech, it’s wise to be on the lookout for weasel…
The University of Illinois Board of Trustees just concluded a meeting at which they formally voted to reject the appointment of Steven Salaita. However, the vote was not unanimous. Trustee James Montgomery, who had earlier signed the letter endorsing the dismissal of Salaita, changed his mind: “I think I made a mistake, and I don’t…
This morning, Sept. 11, the University of Illinois Board of Trustees will meet in Urbana, and the trustees show no signs of backing down from their support for the firing of Steven Salaita. But the protests continue: at noon, the Campus Faculty Association and other campus unions and students will hold a rally at UIUC.…
Two days ago I posted a piece on this blog that asked, “Is ‘Incivility’ the New Communism?” In that post I suggested that recent attempts to enforce standards of “civility” at colleges and universities, often, as in the Salaita case at Illinois and the Marzec incident in Ohio, in response to pro-Palestinian expression, recalled previous…
Chad Taylor, the Democratic candidate for the Senate seat in Kansas currently held by the long-serving but vulnerable Republican Senator Pat Roberts, recently announced that he was withdrawing from the race. The move was widely seen as an attempt to improve the chances of the Independent candidate Greg Orman, who was consistently finishing ahead of…
On this past Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight” show, John Oliver devoted about two thirds of the show to an extended riff on the student-debt issue. At one point, he compared taking on student debt to getting a sexually transmitted disease: “Essentially, student debt is like HPV. If you go to college, you’re almost certainly going…
Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man. New York: Dial, 1964. Thomas Berger had such a long and productive career that it is a mystery why he is not routinely included in discussions of the great American novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. One of the highlights of his career was the critical…
Steven Salaita issued the following statement today in a press conference near the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. For more about his case, visit the Center for Constitutional Rights. My name is Steven Salaita. I am a professor with an accomplished scholarly record; I have been a fair and devoted teacher to hundreds of undergraduate and…
Over the last several weeks, Purdue University has announced that its School of Communications and its College of Technology have received $500,000 grants from President Mitch Daniels for creating, respectively, a three-year baccalaureate program and a competency-based program. In the media coverage, there has been a great deal of positive spin on the possibilities opened…
There is almost no contemporary fiction that I could confidently describe as being universally inoffensive. I mean this without any snideness whatsoever, but I don’t know how English faculty at Christian colleges and universities manage to teach any courses in contemporary literature. I occasionally teach an interdisciplinary Honors seminar called “The Meanings of Rivers,” in…