Academic freedom
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UCLA Law School hosts a conference on the legal consequences of the response to 9/11…
…on the 25th anniversary of the attacks. Right-wing garbage media go crazy, and UCLA Chancellor issues statement condemning the event at his own law school! UCLA law faculty issue their own statement in response. The Chancellor should resign, he has no business leading a serious research university.
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Against viewpoint diversity
A scholar at Johns Hopkins, Lisa Siraganian, makes seven useful points!
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Johns Hopkins President Ron Daniels’ continuing war on academic freedom
First he was involved in the Trump Administration’s document calling for a massive violation of academic freedom, and now he intends to take the war on academic freedom to every department at Hopkins by pushing for “a shift in the recruitment of faculty,” partnering with the conservative American Enterprise Institute in order “to move with…
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Nathan Cofnas probably is in violation of Ghent’s “Code of Ethics”…
…as this piece argues (with some pretty choice quotes from Dr. Cofnas), but the Ghent “Code of Ethics” is obviously incompatible with academic freedom, so my conclusion is that researchers at the University of Ghent do not have academic freedom with respect to the topics the Code touches. (This Twitter thread about Dr. Cofnas’s work…
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Philosopher Nathan Cofnas, who launched the media frenzy about Jason Arday, has been suspended by Ghent University in Belgium…
…pending an investigation into possible “discrimination” against the late Professor Arday. It was Dr. Cofnas’s July 21 substack post that opened the flood gates of media coverage of allegations against Professor Arday, that ultimately led to (what everyone is assuming was) his suicide. While many of the allegations were clearly warranted, the tone and style…
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Fascinating piece by Tyler Harper on the “diversity” madness at Bates College…
…where he used to teach, before joining The Atlantic. Harper is Black and also a socialist. I first encountered him on Twitter, where he was a sharp critic from the left of the excesses of the Wokerati. This new piece is beautifully written and both horrifying and laugh-out-loud funny at points. Some excerpts (but there…
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University of Minnesota pays $250,000 settlement after wrongfully rescinding job offer to Holocaust scholar who called Israeli retaliation in Gaza “genocide”
They would have had to pay more except the scholar does have a tenured job elsewhere. (Thanks to Phil Bold for the pointer.)
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Amended complaint in philosopher Stephen Kershnar’s lawsuit against SUNY Fredonia for violating his First Amendment rights
His former colleague Neil Feit kindly shared it with me: You can start reading from paragraph 52 onwards for a case study in how not to handle a public relations crisis because of a faculty member’s lawful, but controversial, speech. Every SUNY official mentioned behaved terribly, and there is no question they violated Professor Kershnar’s…
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The Trump collaborators: Michael Crow (Arizona State), Ron Daniels (Johns Hopkins), Douglas Girod (Kansas), Andrew Martin (Wash U/St. Louis)
These four university President have participated in drafting a new “call to action” from Linda McMahon, the former wrestling executive turned Secretary of Education, to the nation’s universities. Crow and Martin are no surprise, but Daniels is, and he and Martin have now disgraced their universities, since the “call to action” is both internally inconsistent…
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San Jose State professor fired after engaging in pro-Palestinian protests reinstated by arbitrator’s decision
An interesting case. It seems like the right decision: firing a tenured professor was wildly disproportionate to the offense, given the professor’s strong record. It was no doubt crucial that the San Jose State faculty is unionized.
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Yale AAUP Chapter lawyers up as it threatens to take legal action if Yale Admin cuts a deal with Trump
CHE story here. It’s obviously true that “deals” with a criminal like Trump are almost never reliable, but, contrary to what the article suggests, there is no “academic freedom” right to engage in unlawful discrimination in admissions. The only question here is factual: does Yale continue to discriminate against white and Asian applicants? If so,…
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Texas AAUP sues Texas Tech over its clearly unlawful attemps to control course content and faculty speech
I trust the federal courts will put a stop to this mischief. I hope they get to depose Gauleiter Creighton! (Earlier coverage.)
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U of Tennessee pays $1.9 million to assistant professor wrongfully fired…
…for exercising her First Amendment rights after the murder of Charlie Kirk. She did not, however, get her job back, but my guess she will walk away with more than one million of the settlement. Hopefully these kinds of payouts will teach spineless administrators something the next time the exercise of First Amendment rights offends…
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An English professor responds to the Boghossian Report
Jonathan Kramnick, a philosophically-minded English professor at Yale, has an interesting response to the “Boghossian Report” which is worth reading. Professor Kramnick agrees with the Report that, “When scholarship becomes subordinated to extra-scholarly ends — when a field decides in advance what its findings must be and bends its methods accordingly — it ceases to…
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A weak response to the “Boghossian Report” by the AAUP chapters at Wash U/St. Louis and Vanderbilt (whose Chancellors comissioned the report)
The response is here. It states that, Historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists are singled out for caricature while the authors fail to acknowledge their own public biases against scholarship performed in the name of social justice. No evidence is adduced that scholars in these fields were caricatured, so we are left wondering why we should…
The phrase ‘Does the fact’ naturally invites howls of derision: it’s a fact that every child knows that the Japanese…