Of Academic Freedom and False Alarms
It has been a very strange year. Three weeks ago I opened my email to find an unsolicited email from a lawyer, asking if I needed help. Odd, I thought,…
Posts tagged with
“free speech”
Censoring a Thousand Words: Universities Must Cease Punishing Students for Their Online Pictures
In 1980, Apple founder Steve Jobs called the computer “a bicycle for our minds.” Today, the advent of smartphones gives individuals the power to share images instantaneously with the rest…
Did You Know? Two British Reforms America Should Copy
Two recent British policy briefs on academic freedom and university reforms provide some broad suggestions applicable to colleges, British or otherwise. Policy Exchange, a center-right think tank, published “Academic Freedom…
Did You Know? Students, Faculty Punished for Speech on Social Media
Fordham University student Austin Tong has found himself in hot water over a protest picture on Instagram. In it, he posed with a gun to commemorate the 31st anniversary of…
Activist Academics Threaten the Integrity of Higher Ed
The rise of activist professors has shaped the culture in higher ed for decades. As activists have become more prominent, a familiar process has changed academic departments, pushing scholars out…
‘Witches’ and ‘Viruses:’ The Activist-Academic Threat and a Policy Response
How much of academia is infiltrated by activists? Some conservatives claim that “neo-Marxism” and its sister paradigms like feminist pedagogy, post-structuralism, and post-modernism have long infected certain departments in the…
Idaho’s Higher Education Earthquake?
Higher education reform will only come from the outside, probably from political reform. Or so we thought. Along came the coronavirus, also an outside force, that is upsetting the status…
What Provosts Get Wrong: A Failed Case for Campus Speech Restrictions
On picking up What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus, one might expect a book urging those who dismiss today’s college students’ complaints about institutional racism,…
Did You Know? The States Doing the Most to Protect Student Rights
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education was founded in 1999 by University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors and Boston civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate. One of the country’s…
Free Expression at Duke: What Do Freshmen Blue Devils Think?
As director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Campus Free Expression Project, I am always eager to get beyond the DC beltway to learn how students understand free expression on their…