BY AUDREY TRUSCHKE The following are remarks made at a virtual congressional briefing on “Hindu Supremacists attacks on Academic Freedom,” sponsored by a coalition of eighteen organizations in the United States on September 8, 2021. The remarks have been lightly edited for style and updated with a postscript on a recent academic conference. Hindu nationalism…
BY CATHERINE M. YOUNG Follow the foibles of Claire Park, a Walt Whitman expert and part-time instructor at a small liberal arts college and large public university as she looks ahead to the fall semester and wonders how she will pay her November and December rent if her third class is canceled because not enough…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a statement issued today, September 17, by the Council of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT). For background on this case see this previous post and CAUT’s statement imposing censure. On April 22, the Council of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) took…
BY PRANAV JANI 1984 meets Professor Umbridge. That’s what came to my mind when I heard of two bills currently being debated in the Ohio legislature, HB 322 and 327. Seeking to define a category of “divisive concepts” that Ohio children and adult students in college need to be protected from, these bills legitimize the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday, Kent Syverud, Chancellor and President of Syracuse University, and David Van Slyke, Dean of that institution’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, issued a statement in response to controversy that had emerged around a faculty member’s comments about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The faculty member, a tenure-track assistant…
BY STEVEN LUBET Big-time college football is back, with all the tradition and pageantry, but the sport may soon face a well-deserved existential reckoning for two reasons—one physical and the other financial. First, parents may no longer allow their children to participate in youth and high school football, where the numbers have been declining for…
BY HANK REICHMAN A group of 177 Stanford University professors from more than 40 departments, most in the physical and natural sciences, today made public a September 8 letter they sent to US Attorney General Merrick Garland calling for an end to a Trump administration program that sought to uncover alleged Chinese spies in American…
BY ELLEN SCHRECKER Every once in a while, when some new threat to civil liberties or violation of academic freedom surfaces, I get a call from a journalist, documentary filmmaker, or fellow academic asking me to compare the current situation to McCarthyism. ”Can it happen again?” “Is what’s happening today as bad as it was…
BY KEVIN MCGRUDER In 2021, the movement against the purported teaching of Critical Race Theory in K-12 schools and public colleges dominated public discussions in many communities and has now resulted in legislation against the teaching of “divisive concepts” in many states. It is a matter of public record, as Jennifer Ruth noted here, that…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Last week, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) released a new database of more than four hundred “Scholars Under FIRE” since 2015 and announced it in breathtaking terms starting with the headline: “REPORT: 3 in 4 campaigns targeting faculty expression result in punishment.” In reality, this three-in-four number included any…