Some Issues Never Die

BY MARJORIE HEINS Guest blogger Marjorie Heins is the author of six books about civil liberties and civil rights, including Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge, and, most recently, Ironies and Complications of Free Speech. Some issues in the American free-speech universe never die. Does teaching “creation science”…

On Its 50th Anniversary, What's Left of Keyishian?

BY MARJORIE HEINS Marjorie Heins is the author of Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge, a history of McCarthy era attacks on teachers and professors, of the Supreme Court’s initially acquiescent response, and of the Court’s eventual vindication of academic freedom in the 1967 Keyishian case. By Marjorie…

Koch Foundation Buys Academic Slots

By Marjorie Heins, Free Expression Policy Project The Koch brothers, Charles and David, are best-known for donating millions to the election campaigns of Tea Party candidates and others committed to fighting regulation of business and to protecting the oil and gas industries from efforts to combat climate change. It turns out that Charles Koch, through…

Rethinking Academic Boycotts

This is a guest post by Marjorie Heins, a contributor to the newest issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom. Professor Heins teaches “Censorship in American Culture and Law” at New York University and is a member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. In 2005, a coalition of Palestinian organizations issued a call…

Interview with Author Marjorie Heins

Marjorie Heins, founder of The Free Expression Policy Project, is the author of the new book Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge (NYU Press, February 2013). In her book (watch video interviews with her), Heins examines the critical Supreme Court cases of the 1950s and 1960s that first…

Trading Academic Freedom for Foreign Markets

By Marjorie Heins, founder, Free Expression Policy Project The current controversy over Yale University’s planned campus in Singapore is, at bottom, an argument over how much compromise on free speech is justified in exchange for the presumed benefits of locating branches of U.S. universities within authoritarian regimes. Although the champions of global ventures like Yale’s…

The Keyishian Ruling, 45 Years Later

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,…