Here is the opening of a speech given by Jim Leach, Chairman of the NEH, at the University of California-Davis on April 8: In the wake of a series of incidents at high schools, colleges and universities across the land that range from harassment of immigrants to the painting of swastikas on doors of students […]
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With various co-authors, University of British Columbia Sociologist Neil Gross has made a cottage industry of downplaying charges that academia is politically correct. Seemingly, the left’s domination of social science and humanities departments is of no more concern than the fact, cited by Thomas Sowell, that in the 1990s, Cambodians ran 90 percent of California’s […]
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During a conversation at an academic conference, a professor from an Ivy League school refers to two female graduate students as “black bitches.” After the students report the incident, the professor apologizes — but it takes another two months, and vociferous protests from the campus black community, for the university officials to acknowledge the issue […]
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One of the Thomas Jefferson Center’s 2010 “Muzzle Awards” for achievement in censorship goes to the president and administration of Southwestern College in Chulah Vista, California. Like many censorship-minded colleges, Southwestern confines student protesters to a tiny area of the campus, far from most student traffic. Shouting, “Let’s go where they can hear us,” students […]
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In the past few days, Duke announced resolutions of two disputes that had bedeviled the university. First, in response to a protest from FIRE, the university overruled the Women’s Center’s refusal to host an exhibition sponsored by a Duke pro-life organization. In a perfect irony, announcement of the reversal came from Women’s Center Director Ada […]
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In the past few days, Duke announced resolutions of two disputes that had bedeviled the university. First, in response to a protest from FIRE, the university overruled the Women’s Center’s refusal to host an exhibition sponsored by a Duke pro-life organization. In a perfect irony, announcement of the reversal came from Women’s Center Director Ada […]
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The City University of New York (CUNY) serves as a type of funhouse mirror to faculty conditions throughout the academy: for a variety of structural reasons (the vise-like grip of the faculty union and the legacy of economic difficulties in the 1970s and 1980s, which drove out many high-quality scholars searching for better-paying jobs, leaving […]
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A heckler’s veto at Tarleton State University in Texas has stopped a class production of an excerpt of the Terence McNally play, Corpus Christi, which depicts Jesus and his disciples as homosexuals. Canceling the presentation was a mistake. It was made by a professor running his own class, not the university administration, which muddles the […]
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The Duke University women’s center has canceled a discussion of student motherhood as “upsetting and not OK” because the sponsoring group, Duke Students for Life was holding a pro-life event elsewhere on campus. A spokesman for the center said the pictures at the “Week for Life” event were “traumatizing,” perhaps because he was under the […]
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A student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison drew an unusual and alarming advertising request for its online edition. The request to the Badger Herald came a few weeks ago from an agent for Bradley R. Smith, a notorious denier of the Holocaust and founder of the loopy fringe group, Committee for Open Debate on […]
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The flap over the hecklers’ veto of Anne Coulter at the University of Ottawa is a surprise only to those who haven’t noticed the steady march of censorship in Canada. Canada is “a pleasantly authoritarian country,” Alan Borovoy, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, once said. That phrase perfectly captures the cloud of […]
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Wendy Kaminer has an important post at The Atlantic asking why free speech organizations—with the notable exception of FIRE—aren’t doing much of anything to stand up for the rights of students and educators punished for their opposition to issues associated with gay rights. Regarding the treatment of students, I fully agree with Kaminer. But should […]
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AEI recently released a fine compendium volume The Politically Correct University, edited by Robert Maranto, Richard E. Redding, and Frederick M. Hess, featuring an excellent slate of essays and contributors: here’s a sampling: Do take a look; there’s much of worth here: – “The American University: Yesterday, Today – and Tomorrow” James Piereson – “Linguistics […]
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How About A Real Campaign Against Abuses? Every year at about this time, radical Islamic students—aided by radical anti-Israel professors—hold an event they call “Israel Apartheid Week.” During this week, they try to persuade students on campuses around the world to demonize Israel as an apartheid regime. Most students seem to ignore the rantings of […]
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Regulars at FIRE’s must-read blog, The Torch, already know the ugly details of events at California-San Diego. A fraternity held an off-campus party that was at best tasteless and at worst racist. Appearing on a student-run TV station (which is funded by the student government through student fees), a student satirical organization defended the party […]
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A graduate of Wesleyan sent word that his alma mater now has a “Campus Climate Log” to chronicle “hate incidents and acts of intolerance” and help move “the entire campus towards a hate-free learning environment.” The project, wrapped in conventional diversity rhetoric, is overseen by the Dean of Diversity and Student Engagement as well as […]
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In some quarters I’m viewed as a lawyer with a professional identity problem: I’ve spent half of my time representing students and professors struggling with administrators over issues like free speech, academic freedom, due process and fair disciplinary procedures. The other half I’ve spent representing individuals (and on occasion organizations and companies) in the criminal […]
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Two researchers offer a new twist on an old question—why do college professors overwhelmingly lean to the left? Bias against conservatives is not the main reason, nor are the allegedly higher IQs of liberals, say Neil Gross of the University of British Columbia and Ethan Fosse of Harvard. Instead they suggest a theory of “path […]
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Sometimes people who don’t work in academia wonder why colleges are often the object of debates over free speech. Sure, some observers know that campuses are liberal enclaves, and they regard professors and administrators as easily intimidated by identity politics. But most people remember their college days as pretty much apolitical, and they continue to […]
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Cary Nelson, current president of the American Association of University Professors, has a new book dealing with academic freedom and its relationship to broader structural problems in higher education. No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom is interesting and important, but also frustrating. It provides remedies to the problems confronting academic freedom at the […]
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In an unintentional, if powerful, commentary on the grip that groupthink has on some quarters of the economy, LeMoyne professor Dolores Byrnes informed readers of the NEA’s Thought & Action that “some professors of education recently told me during a department retreat: ‘We are all Marxist, it doesn’t even need to be said.’” No wonder […]
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KC Johnson beat me to the punch in registering doubts and concerns about the letter University of Minnesota General Counsel Mark B. Rotenberg has written to Adam Kissel at FIRE regarding the education department’s review of the curriculum. Kissel and FIRE are to be praised for having wrought out of the university a letter assuring […]
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Just before Christmas, FIRE issued a press release appropriately celebrating a letter from the University of Minnesota general counsel declaring GET. The letter was good news not for its contents but for its existence. It’s hard to imagine that a public university’s chief attorney would sign off on anything approximating what the U of M’s […]
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“Trustees Approve Free Speech Policy,” said the November 30th headline in the Tufts student newspaper. This purports to be good news, but this is Tufts, a university addicted to bragging about free expression on campus while introducing yet another version of its long-discredited speech code. The one-page “Declaration on Freedom of Expression at Tufts University” […]
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Thanks to the efforts of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—and a rare, if welcome, instance of Congress standing up for students’ rights in higher education—the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) abandoned its de facto “social justice” criterion. Yet while the development made […]
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Earlier this month a Maine parole commission accomplished what pleas from citizens and the governor of Massachusetts could not, in preventing the speech of a convicted terrorist at the University of Massachusetts. Widespread protest greeted an invitation by professors to Raymond Luc Levasseur, the leader of United Freedom Front, a violent anti-government group linked to […]
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The indispensible FIRE—the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—bestows a regular mock honor on some offending college or university: the Speech Code of the Month. So far this year, the winners have included New York University (which bans, among other things, inappropriate jokes and teasing), the University of Idaho (no “insensitive” actions or communications), Northern […]
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A convicted terror bomber, Raymond Luc Levasseur, invited by a far left center to speak at the University of Massachusetts. Amherst, was disinvited after pressure from police groups and Governor Deval Partrick, then reinvited when the university president Jack Wilson intervened. Levasseur is a former leader of the United Freedom Front a radical group responsible […]
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The president of the University of Chicago, Robert J. Zimmer, spoke at Columbia University on October 21st on the topic, “What Is Academic Freedom For?” Minding the Campus invited several academics and other observers of the campus scene to post brief reactions to President Zimmer’s remarks. The comments are from Peter Sacks, Erin O’Connor and […]
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(This is a response to Robert Weissberg’s “Rescuing The University”) Professor Weissberg’s “Rescuing the University” offers a compact assessment of the frailties of the movement to restore higher education to light and sanity. He also urges the merits of another, he supposes, untried approach. “Guerilla warfare” and “monastery construction” are the unflattering labels he affixes […]
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