We missed this unusual column when it appeared in the Harvard Crimson two weeks ago, but it’s worthy of comment even at this late date. It begins with Olympia Snow’s complaint that the Senate is not a place “that ensures all voices are heard and considered,” then moves swiftly to argue that Harvard isn’t such […]
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This is the text of a speech given March 28, 2012 at a Manhattan Institute luncheon in New York City. *** I began representing students in 1969. A group of Harvard students took over University Hall in an anti-Vietnam War protest. There was a lot of violence, President Pusey called in the police, and […]
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Two of our best writers here at Minding the Campus, KC Johnson and Harvey Silverglate, spoke quite brilliantly at a Manhattan Institute luncheon last Wednesday on “Kangaroo Courts: Yale, Duke and Student Rights.” It is, in our opinion, the best possible short course for understanding the star-chamber proceedings that students face these days at campuses […]
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Remarks delivered at a Manhattan Institute luncheon, March 28, 2012 in New York City. Professor Johnson and attorney Harvey Silverglate, whose talk will be presented here tomorrow, spoke on “Kangaroo Courts: Yale, Duke and Student Rights.” *** Before the Patrick Witt case, I had some experience writing about how the New York Times handles […]
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Posted by Fr. John Sims Baker The students here at Vanderbilt Catholic have decided to move our 500-member group off campus rather than allow the university to dictate who our leaders might be. Using anti-discrimination rules, the administration says campus groups must allow all students to become group officials–which would means we must accept non-religious […]
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Did the shuttering last year of a Yale institute created to study anti-Semitism have anything to do with campus politics? The university denied it. But the Yale Interdisciplinary Initiative for the Study of Anti-Semitism (YIISA) was eliminated amid attacks from Palestinian representatives and anti-Israel faculty.
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Cross-posted from Open Market. Provisions are being added to the 1994 Violence Against Women Act that could undermine due process on campus and in criminal cases, as civil liberties groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and civil libertarians like former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer have noted. The changes are contained […]
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In a recent interview, Columbia University president Lee Bollinger was asked whether the Hazelwood standard of student speech should be applied to colleges and universities. (Hazelwood gave high-school teachers and administrators broad authority to restrict student speech, in the name of advancing “legitimate pedagogical goals.”) Bollinger issued a strong caution:
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The Kennedy School’s “One-State” conference provided only the latest reminder of the hostile on-campus attitude toward Israel. (Imagine the likelihood of any major campus hosting an allegedly academic conference ruminating about the destruction as a state of Iran, or Egypt, or Mexico.) In light of the conference and its controversy, it’s worth reviewing an excellent […]
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Inside Higher Ed reports this morning — surprise! — that “®oughly two-thirds of public and private college presidents say they plan to vote for President Obama in November.” Only two-thirds? Actually, that is a surprise. I wonder how many of them are in states that have had to cut or reduce spending on higher education […]
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Vartan Gregorian once said the way to become a successful college president is simple: stand up, give a speech on “diversity,” then sit down. Richard Levin, president of Yale, is the longest-lasting president of an Ivy League university, and following Gregorian’s sage advice is surely one reason why. Whenever a serious incident occurs at Yale, […]
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Dr. London, a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, received the Jeane Kirkpatrick Award for Academic Freedom on February 9 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the American Conservative Union Foundation. These were his remarks on the occasion. *** It is with enormous humility and gratitude that I accept this award from the […]
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In a case highlighted by FIRE, Oakland University in Michigan issued a three-semester suspension to a student named Joseph Corlett, allegedly in response to some of Corlett’s in-class writings that passed well beyond the bounds of good taste (in a writing journal, he ruminated on the sexual attractiveness of his female professors) and to Corbett’s […]
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Consider the following two cases: • Crystal Smith, VP for Human Resources at a small historically black state college in the deep South, was fired for her published letter in the local newspaper praising affirmative action and condemning Ward Connerly as a bigoted Uncle Tom because of his opposition to race preferences. In dismissing her […]
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Cross-posted from NAS. Several weeks ago, KC Johnson–a scholar I much admire, not least for his fearless dedication to principle–published an essay on Minding the Campus under the title, “Keeton Defense Contradicts NAS Principles.” We offered Professor Johnson the opportunity to re-post his article or contribute a further statement on the NAS website. He accepted […]
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FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has attracted important support for its open letter asking the Department of Education to define harassment narrowly enough to allow genuinely free speech on campus. Many colleges and universities ban expression that might be considered “offensive” or cause “embarrassment” or “ridicule.” The January 6 letter, sent to […]
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Although our beleaguered universities continue their seemingly inexorable march from being institutions of higher education to resembling, more and more, political and social re-education camps for the young, every now and then the students demonstrate that they remain well ahead of campus administrations and faculties when it comes to appreciating the true role of our […]
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Keeping quiet can seal your fate if you are a professor facing a campus kangaroo court after being accused of racial “harassment” over your classroom speech. Free-speech advocates use adverse publicity to save wrongly-accused professors from being convicted and fired. They put to good use Justice Brandeis’s observation that publicity cures social evils, […]
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It’s not often that a university’s personnel decision is so egregious that even the editorial pages of the local newspaper denounce it. That occurred with Hamline University, whose seemingly rescinded appointment to Tom Emmer generated a blistering editorial from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Between 2004 and 2010, Emmer served as a prominent member of the Republican […]
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The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) has done it again. This is the group that effectively drove former Harvard president Lawrence Summers out of office over a 2005 remark of his about possible differences between the sexes that didn’t sit well with hard-line feminists on the Harvard faculty. The FAS voted its “lack […]
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The Los Angeles Times penned a misleading, strangely-argued editorial, criticizing DA Tony Rackauckas for prosecuting the “Irvine 11.” The basic outline of the affair is now well-known: members of the Cal-Irvine Muslim Students Organization conspired to disrupt a campus speech by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren. Eugene Volokh spells out the relevant statute under which the students […]
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It has been over a week since the University of Wisconsin at Madison was torn by the debate over affirmative action on September 13. The conflict was precipitated by the presentation of a study conducted by the Center for Equal Opportunity, which alleges reverse discrimination in UW admissions policies. A lot has been written about […]
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Most observers have framed the recent disruption by backers of racial and ethnic preferences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a free-speech conflict. Free speech is clearly involved but lying below the surface are three issues that warrant close attention, specifically how Wisconsin once handled “inclusion;” how the protest reflects the transformation of the idea […]
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The Pope Center’s Duke Cheston has issued what is essentially a call for the abolition of college fraternities, adding a conservative battle cry to a war which hitherto has been largely waged by liberals: feminists, political correctness-besotted campus administrators, and, lately, the Obama administration’s Education Department. In an essay for the Pope Center’s website he […]
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Harvard College’s Class of 2015 found something unprecedented awaiting their arrival on campus: an ideological pledge. It was framed as a request for allegiance to certain social and political principles. No such request had been made of Harvard students since the college’s founding by Puritans in 1636. First-years are being pressured to sign a “Freshman […]
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The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) made its name as a respectable association dedicated to promoting the interests of the academy and protecting the academic freedom of professors. Now, judging from its regular publications, it has morphed into something quite different—an association dedicated to promoting the agenda of the academic left. The July-August issue […]
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The AAUP has now completed the final version of what NAS’ Peter Wood aptly termed a “firewall,” designed to protect academics from outside criticism, especially from conservatives and supporters of Israel. The organization’s new standards now face their first test–but from a most unexpected source. In the left-leaning New Republic, Alex Klein has a blog […]
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The American Association of University Professors has now issued its final report on “Ensuring Academic Freedom in Politically Controversial Academic Personnel groups.”) The basic principle is as unobjectionable as it is admirable: professors should not be hired, fired, or disciplined on the basis of their political beliefs. Yet the AAUP’s report is basically unchanged from […]
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Of the criticisms directed toward the contemporary academy, the charge of “indoctrination” strikes me as the most overhyped. The phenomenon certainly occurs; the most obvious recent example came in the “dispositions” controversy, when education students around the country could choose between agreeing with their professors’ political opinions and finding another career path. But it’s relatively […]
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For more than a decade, universities have forced Christian student groups to fight a rather puzzling battle. In a campus environment where it’s assumed that Democratic student groups can reserve leadership for Democrats, environmentalist groups can be run by actual environmentalists, and socialist groups can have socialist leaders, Christian groups have been fighting for the […]
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