How Academe Helped to Elect Trump
President Trump scares academe. Many feel threatened, under siege, rejected, aghast. Eric Klineberg, professor of sociology at New York University, summed up this anxiety a few days after the election:…
Posts tagged with
“academic freedom”
A Tweet Too Far
When Drexel University political science professor George Ciccariello-Maher tweeted “All I want for Christmas is white genocide” on Christmas Eve, he handed the Philadelphia school an opportunity to play an…
Academic Freedom in an Age of Political Correctness
In 2010, a seemingly insignificant event in a far-off land caught my eye. The Israeli academic world was having a fracas over the actions of “post-Zionist” faculty that raised important…
The University of Chicago’s Support for Free Speech Sparks Opposition
Last month, just before the new academic year began, the University of Chicago’s dean of students, John Ellison, sent a letter (reproduced in this piece) to all incoming students. It…
Academic Freedom in the Age of Political Correctness
The current consensus on academic freedom in higher education is crumbling and a new framework that more equitably represents all stakeholders – faculty, students, administrators, and society – is urgently…
UnFree My Campus
Freedom of speech has been under siege at many American colleges and universities. Sometimes the attack comes from aggressive students who can’t stand having others say things they disagree with,…
Students Learn Climate Change Advocacy, Not Climate Science
For almost thirty years, I have taught climate science at three different universities. What I have observed is that students are increasingly being fed climate change advocacy as a surrogate…
When university boards of governance actually govern
It is heartwarming to see state officials do the jobs they were elected to do. Too often they have shied away from their obligations to ensure that the university system adheres to appropriate standards of scholarship.
Stanley Fish on the five schools of thought about academic freedom
When we speak about “academic freedom” what, exactly, do we mean? How far should academic freedom extend? How do we know when someone claiming it has actually abused it?
Doubts about the integrity of Confucius Institutes lead to mounting criticism
What are the limits of the partnerships that a public institution of higher education may form? A growing number of critics, including university officials and faculty, argue that accepting funding and academic influence from the communist Chinese government crosses a line.