BY JOHN K. WILSON The headlines declared a common story about how repressive students are today: “Study Finds Majority Of College Students Think Government Should Punish ‘Hate Speech.’” “Nearly two-thirds of college students think government should have power to punish ‘hate speech’: survey.” “U. of Wisconsin students not big fans of free speech, according to…
BY NADINE STROSSEN WITH JOHN K. WILSON Nadine Strossen, the former ACLU President (1991-2008) and Professor of Constitutional Law at New York Law School, is the author of a new book, HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press). She will be speaking May 5 at Politics and Prose…
BY MARTIN KICH Writing for the Seattle Times, Benjamin Woodard provides a timeline of events that occurred in the city on the day of Trump’s inauguration, events that culminated in the shooting of a man involved in a protest outside of a hall where Milo Yiannopolous was speaking. Perhaps it is simply a problem with…
POSTED BY HENRY REICHMAN The following statement, signed by over 150 historians of Judaism, was published yesterday by the Jewish Journal. As scholars of Jewish history, we are acutely attuned to the fragility of democracies and the consequences for minorities when democracies fail to live up to their highest principles. The United States has a…
To some extent, sanctimony is the “civilized” version of dogma enforced by social, religious, or political conformity and then, when that proves insufficient, the threat of force. There is now a great deal of attention to the nature of the satire published in Charlie Hebdo, with some commentators finding it almost embarrassingly juvenile and others…
The Committee on Freedom of Expression at the University of Chicago has issued a report explaining why a university must have “lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation.” The Committee was apparently created partly in response to a petition by a group of University of Chicago students, asking that the Institute of Politics ban…
In an earlier post, “A Rhetoric of Demonization and Exclusion” [https://academeblog.org/2013/05/23/a-rhetoric-of-demonization-and-exclusion/], I discussed the lunatic-fringe rhetoric of the GOP nominee for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, Bishop D.W. Jackson. That post included a re-post of a post to Right-Wing Watch, which drew on public pronouncements by Jackson that have been reported in the print media or…