BY JONATHAN MARKS Guest blogger Jonathan Marks teaches political philosophy at Ursinus College. John Villasenor, Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute is only the latest commentator to worry aloud about our college young, who don’t understand or value freedom of expression. A survey he conducted contains familiar bad news. A majority of respondents holds…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Today’s decision by the University of Florida to ban rental of space for an event by white supremacist Robert Spencer is a threat to free speech on campus, and the reasoning behind it poses a danger to a wide range of speech. University of Florida president W. Kent Fuchs justified his…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL One of the most unfortunate results of the overheated political rhetoric that consumed the presidential election, transition, and early days of the Trump presidency has been the unwillingness of either side to see the opportunity for reasoned intellectual debate with those with whom they disagree and perhaps don’t even respect. Protesters…
In a number of instances, I have been told that many on the Far Right are every bit as concerned about constraints on academic freedom as Progressives are. When I have pointed out that most of the attacks on academic freedom seem to have come from Far Right political figures and commentators who are responding…
Laura Loomer, a student at Barry University, was suspended on Monday. Her crime? Embarrassing the university, by recording an undercover video for James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas in which she duped employees into expressing support for her forming a pro-ISIS student group. What Loomer did was sleazy and dishonest. She took advantage of the fact that…
In a commentary published yesterday by The Chronicle of Higher Education, an English professor at Utah State under a headline with lack of logic (English professors should know better, I can say that, I am an English professor), “Guns on Campus Have Already Curtailed Free Speech,” blames the right to bear arms on “feminist and…
This is a guest post by Tim Shiell, a contributor to the newest issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom. Shiell is a Professor of Philosophy and founder and Associate Director of the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. He primarily teaches ethics courses and researches issues at the intersection of law, ethics and…
At the end of an article of his published yesterday in The New York Times, Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) says: Students can’t learn how to navigate democracy and engage with their fellow citizens if they are forced to think twice before they speak their mind. Well… actually they can, and…
On March 3-4, students at Harvard are organizing a “One State Conference: Israel/Palestine and the One State Solution.” I don’t want to delve into the charges of bigotry that can be leveled by either side. My concern here is about freedom of speech. On David Horowitz’s Frontpagemag, Steven Plaut harshly condemned the conference in over-the-top…