BY FRANK E. RITTER AND DONALD A. DONAHUE We will need to continue to protect ourselves from COVID-19, probably through spring 2022. Colleges and universities have long been recognized as places of increased risk for communicable diseases. While higher education has benefited from immunization mandates against “childhood diseases” in primary and secondary schools, they have…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF New York Times right-wing opinion writer Ross Douthat led the November 11, 2021, print edition of the editorial pages with “Why We Need New Colleges.” Readers familiar with his fantasy-laden writing will not be surprised. I always shake my head when reading Douthat’s never-documented imaginings, but sometimes, like that day, I…
BY JENNIFER RUTH If you haven’t seen it, you might want to read Colleen Flaherty’s excellent piece “Recentering the Bright Sheng Debate” in Inside Higher Ed today. Last Friday, I wrote about the vast libertarian network researched in the new book Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War. This funding, much of which…
BY HANK REICHMAN With freedom comes responsibility. That old maxim is frequently heard in controversies involving academic freedom. Too often it is taken simply to suggest that such freedom carries with it the responsibility to limit the degree to which freedom is exercised. Don’t rock the boat, we have been warned, if we don’t want…
BY JENNIFER RUTH “One looks in vain for mainstream reporting to call this what it is,” Columbia law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw told the audience at the National Teach-In held on October 14th in honor of George Floyd’s birthday. The fanatical distortions of critical race theory by partisan politicians, the alleged “woke” orthodoxy stifling free speech…
BY HANK REICHMAN I should have expected that those politicians demanding the removal from schools of books on “critical race theory” and other titles dealing with race and gender that might cause “discomfort” would inevitably fall back on that old standby of the book banners — the claim that school libraries and classrooms have been…
BY ROBERT A. SCOTT At the recent National Conservative Conference, the author J. D. Vance, a Yale Law School graduate and former investment banker who is running for the US Senate from Ohio, quoted former president Richard Nixon’s salvo that “the professors are the enemy.” He joins a chorus of those challenging the authority and…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday’s launch of a new “university,” the so-called University of Austin (or UATX; their own acronym, which looks more like a listing on the stock exchange), garnered widespread ridicule on academic social media. University of Rhode Island historian Erik Loomis no doubt spoke for many when he tweeted, “Honestly, making fun of…
BY STEVEN LUBET Three University of Florida political science professors have sued the university trustees and several officials for violations of the First Amendment and academic freedom, alleging that they had been prevented from “testifying on behalf of voting-rights groups in a lawsuit challenging Florida’s Senate Bill 90 (‘SB 90’).” In what appeared to be…
BY PEN AMERICA A wave of alarming legislative efforts to limit teaching and learning on topics including racism, sexism, and American history represent a censorious drive to impose viewpoint and content-based restrictions on freedom of speech and thought in American schools and universities, PEN America said in a report released today. In the report, Educational…