BY JONATHAN REES I have seen exactly one use of AI of which I actually approve. My friend Alegria fed our faculty handbook into NotebookLM, a Google product that can set bounds on what your artificial intelligence digests. Our handbook is an absolute monstrosity. It gives me a headache just to think about it because…
BY JOAN W. SCOTT I was deeply disturbed to see this recent e-mailing from some 27 historians, 12 of whom are former presidents of the American Historical Association (AHA), urging members to vote for the slate proposed by the association’s Nominating Committee. To Members of the LAWCHA listserve, We write to ask those of you…
BY MIKE STEVE COLLINS The Trump administration is waging a highly successful war on knowledge and its pursuit and dissemination, disguised as a war on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); antisemitism; and lack of viewpoint diversity. This war on knowledge has dealt potentially crippling blows to Harvard University and has enabled the brushing aside of…
BY KATHY ROBERTS FORDE AND THE MEMBERS OF THE STAND TOGETHER FOR HIGHER ED LEADERSHIP TEAM* In a rare act of institutional solidarity, twenty-four universities have filed a joint amicus brief supporting Harvard in its lawsuit against the federal government’s attempt to cut research funding. The lawsuit challenges the federal government’s politically motivated suspension of…
BY SAHAR AZIZ For decades, when the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was mentioned, it was usually in reference to combatting antisemitism. Now the ADL is more accurately cited in the litany of pro-Israeli groups attempting to criminalize Muslim and Palestinian students for seeking an end to the horrific genocide in Gaza. For over a hundred years,…
BY ROBERT M. KAPLAN Last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stunned the scientific community by proposing that researchers stop submitting articles to high-impact academic journals and instead publish in government-run outlets. The backlash was swift. Within a day, The Washington Post received more than four thousand comments—most of them scathing. But buried beneath the outrage lies a…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the winter 2025 issue of Academe, which I guest-edited, exiled Russian scholars Ilya Matveev and Evgeny Roshchin surveyed the state of academic freedom in that country in the aftermath of the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. (The issue also includes essays by Ukrainian scholars.) Unsurprisingly, they reported that Security agencies and…
BY DAVID MOSHMAN Readers of this blog may be interested in three new intellectual freedom case repositories that are now available on the MetaCat Foundation website. Feel free to take a look at them before reading on. The first repository is the Academic Freedom Gaza Case Repository, which is connected to my book-in-progress, Gaza, Genocide,…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Jay Bhattacharya, appointed by President Trump to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH), first gained national notoriety as a principal author of the so-called Great Barrington Declaration of 2020, which condemned the NIH for ignoring calls to mostly cease pandemic-related precautions. Now over 300 NIH staff have published the Bethesda…
BY HANK REICHMAN On May 25, the Black Flag Action Group, formed by scholars at Israeli colleges and universities, issued an important Urgent Call to Action demanding the heads of Israeli academic institutions “speak out” and “act immediately” to stop the war on Gaza. By May 31 the Call had collected over 1,400 signatures. As…