Marjorie Heins heads the Free Expression Policy Project (www.fepproject.org) and is the author of Not in Front of the Children: “Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth. In the 1990s she directed the ACLU’s Arts Censorship Project; more recently, she has taught at NYU, UC-San Diego, and the American University of Paris. Her forthcoming book,…
The issue of for-profit colleges is a hot political debate, but until now, for-profits haven’t been mentioned in the presidential election (though they were a major issue in last year’s race for attorney general in Kentucky). But now, a leading candidate for the Republican nomination has injected himself into the debate on for-profit costs and…
For over a decade, undocumented students, despite being proper graduates of California’s high schools, have had to fight for equal access to the state’s colleges and universities. Before 2001, California’s undocumented students were ineligible for in-state tuition and they were denied access to the state’s financial aid, both public and private. It would be another…
Conservatives often portray academia as a place teeming with the influence of liberalism. The all-powerful liberal professors, so the stereotype goes, indoctrinate students with Marxism and political correctness, while muscling conservatives out of the ivory tower, lest their hated views bring a diversity of opinion to campus. But of course, like any caricature, it’s false.…
Daniel Grant writes at Inside Higher Ed about the question of controversial art: “There are no rules of the road to help art instructors and college administrators in this realm.” Actually, there are many rules of the road long established by the art world and the theorists of freedom of speech. It’s very easy: you…
If you follow higher education, you know that the number of students and recent graduates who are interning is higher than ever before. Whether they’re part- or full-time, during school or after graduation, paid or unpaid, internships are becoming a ubiquitous part of early professional experience. By one estimate, as many as three-quarters of college…
The humanities have more to lose in the current budget wars than either the sciences or technical fields, says AAUP president Cary Nelson, in “Fighting for the Humanities,” just out in the new issue of Academe (the full issue will be released next week). This is because people take it for granted that scientific knowledge…
There was lot of Twitter buzz this weekend about a roundtable at the Modern Language Association convention in Seattle on the fight for public higher education (see a roundup of Tweets). The roundtable (organized by yours truly, although in the end I wasn’t able to participate) included Michelle Masse, Jeffrey Williams, Jason Jones, Bob Samuels,…
I’ve been tempted not to comment on the Penn State scandal simply because of the massive attention it’s already received and the fact that speaking out against child molestation is hardly a controversial stand. But the scandal is important precisely because of that attention, and what lessons are drawn from it. Henry A. Giroux and…
According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), “While all of 2011’s Speech Codes of the Month flagrantly violated students’ and faculty members’ right to free expression, two of them were so egregious that they deserve special mention as 2011’s Speech Codes of the Year.” But FIRE got a lot of things wrong…