BY LOUISE PAY Understanding the strategy behind ideological attacks on university employees is the only way to counter them effectively. It’s easy to dismiss cases like the recent incident at the University of Oklahoma (OU), where a graduate instructor’s grading decision was amplified into a public controversy on X (formerly Twitter) by the OU chapter…
BY HANK REICHMAN Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die. As so many have pointed out, political violence—whatever the source—must be condemned for both its immorality and its destructiveness. Much as I have abhorred Kirk and the movement he represented, we are all worse off today than we were before he stepped to a podium…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY Here in Georgia in the last few days: Lawmakers failed to pass a bill to end DEI in student activities and programs in our public university system. The bill would have codified into law policy moves already done to erase DEI in the last year by our system administration. One of our…
BY DANIELLE SLAUGHTER Miguel Cardona Secretary, US Department of Education Dear Secretary Cardona, My name is Danielle Slaughter, and I’m an independent scholar, digital organizer, and mother of two young children. In 2017, I made the difficult decision to transition out of academia. I was pregnant with my second child, and, after the struggles I…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the University of Wisconsin at Madison began instruction online, a move that the great majority of colleges and universities have made or are making in response to the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s what English professor Caroline Gottschalk Druschke told the Wisconsin State Journal about the move: “None of us are going…
BY AARON BARLOW At one point in North by Northwest, Leo G. Carroll’s character The Professor says “It’s so horribly sad. Why is it I feel like laughing?” Of course, he isn’t really a professor but is an intelligence agent. But this professor had exactly that reaction this morning on reading in The Guardian about…
BY EMILY K HOBSON AND JENNA N. HANCHEY Since August 2017, when one of our students became a symbol of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) has seen a rise in white nationalist activity and hate speech on our campus. Yet, UNR is just one target in…
BY SIMON MALOY The following review of Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can Win the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA and creator of the notorious Professor Watchlist, is reposted with permission from Media Matters. Simon Maloy is a senior writer at Media Matters. Formerly a political writer…
BY HANK REICHMAN Charlie Kirk is the twenty-something founder of the right-wing “student group” Turning Point USA, sponsor of the notorious Professor Watchlist. Kirk’s group is so nutso that even the Charles Koch Foundation and the Young America’s Foundation have turned against it. Sarah Ruger, director of Free Speech Initiatives for the Charles Koch Institute,…