Free Republic

These were the words Columbia Professor Joseph Massad used to describe the Hamas murder of over a thousand Jews in its October 7 raid on a music festival and surrounding neighborhoods. More than 30,000 people signed a petition calling for his removal from the University's teaching staff. Thus far, Columbia President Nemat Shafik has rebuffed this demand, saying "our professors should have the right to say anything they wish without fear that it could result in any retaliation against them. This is called 'academic freedom.' Without it the whole university system would collapse. Obviously, from time to time what a...

A North Carolina middle school student was suspended for three days over a conversation he had with classmates about Jesus Christ. The 12-year-old is a seventh grader at Envision Science Academy in Wake Forest. He is also a devout Christian. The young man’s father told me that he received a phone call from the assistant dean saying he needed to attend a meeting about his son’s “continued behavior.” Several of the boy’s classmates had started a conversation during the previous school year about Christianity and his son had explained how they needed a relationship with Jesus Christ to go to...

America is finally waking up to the fact that poisonous, divisive ideas are proliferating in public education, from pre-K to graduate school. The question is how to push back against such ideas. Solutions are easier in K-12; primary and secondary teachers do not have the same protections of academic freedom that college faculty have, and the K-12 curriculum is more tightly controlled by state agencies. The issue is more complex in academia, where academic freedom reigns and the curriculum is controlled by a decentralized faculty. The situation is also more dire at the college level: Higher education is where the...

The administration and board of regents at Concordia University Wisconsin has been deathly silent about this widely reported transgression against academic freedom.Today’s academic landscape is littered with the dry bones of academic freedom. This is true of my own religious university, Concordia University Wisconsin (CUW), from which I have been suspended and put under threat of termination for publishing an academic essay critiquing identity politics. As reported by The Federalist in March, soon after I published that essay, I was banned from campus and put on administrative leave. There I remain three months later, with no clear path to restoration...

Some 500 scholars, including the prominent linguist and Israel critic Noam Chomsky, accused a Scottish university of curbing free speech after a student publication apologized for a 2017 essay it said promoted “an unfounded anti-Semitic theory.” The essay, published in the University of Glasgow’s eSharp magazine in 2017, was titled “Advocating Occupation: Outsourcing Zionist Propaganda in the UK.” Its author, Jane Jackman, wrote that, “Whilst initially strengthening ties with the Jewish Diaspora, Israel’s longer-term objective was to conscript and resource a cohort of grassroots Zionist supporters to carry the Israeli narrative into the broader sphere of society.” ......

Dorian Abbot is an associate professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. He spends his days studying climate change and extrasolar planets. In a piece written for Bari Weiss’ Substack, Abbot says he’s never been particularly political. He uses an online tool to decide who to vote for. But a few years ago he began to have concerns about academic freedom. He says he mostly kept his thoughts to himself for several years but that changed last summer. In the fall of 2020 I started advocating openly for academic freedom and merit-based evaluations. I...

State legislatures are taking up higher education reform. Sometimes higher education reform consists of attempts to regulate what happens on college campuses, such as laws that prohibit universities from requiring students to believe the tenets of critical race theory. Sometimes, as occurred recently in Idaho, state legislatures cut budgets or impose tuition freezes on universities taken with pernicious ideologies. However, whenever legislatures question university practices, universities cry that academic freedom is under assault. If legislatures start asking what is going on in the classrooms or in the curricula, professors might start worrying about what they say. If legislatures cut budgets...

The syllabus is such a basic document that most of us tend not to think much about what goes into making one. What are its necessary ingredients? A listing of the required study and reading materials, obviously. Dates of important milestones, like term papers and exams, as well. Lecture schedules, weekly assignments, and a rubric on how the assignments and exams factor into overall grades. Oh, and an acknowledgment—mandated by the institution—that your campus was built on land stolen from Indigenous peoples, and that your being there contributes to an ongoing intergenerational trauma. Wait, what? That particular hypothetical isn’t a...

I’m an attorney representing a professor at the University of Central Florida who is being subjected by the university to what can only be called an inquisition after expressing opinions on Twitter that led to widespread calls for his firing. UCF is a public institution—an instrument of the state—and is now bringing its full power to bear against a man who dared to question the prevailing orthodoxy that has quickly descended over so many of this country’s institutions. I cannot bear witness to what the university is doing to this man without speaking out against it. If we do not...

Princeton university is consumed from top to bottom with what seems to be the question of the moment: How should it reorder itself to fight racism? The school’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, ordered 23 of the institution’s most senior academic and administrative leaders to focus on how to marshal Princeton’s teaching, research, operations, and partnerships in service of “eliminating racism” on and off campus. By August 21, they are to report on what specifically can be done “to identify, understand, and combat” it. The university is also giving $1,500 grants to students who want to fight racism, and has made...

Academic freedom is under assault by people who want to control research and speech. One of their strategies exploits the gatekeeping functions of journal editors to censor unpopular ideas. The leading open-access journal in the field of intelligence research, the Journal of Intelligence, has a policy listed on its website since 2018 that states, “The journal will not publish articles that may lead to or enhance political controversies and the editors will judge whether that is the case.” In other words, the journal’s editors will reject manuscripts that could be politically controversial—regardless of the quality of the science. On May...

As Americans, we speak our minds. It’s the quintessential American quality. Freedom of expression is so foundational to our liberty that it is enshrined in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. We must never take our freedom of speech for granted. Today, 243 years after our nation’s founding, educational institutions, originally created to foster and promote freedom of thought and freedom of conscience, are now actively suppressing first freedoms in the name of political correctness. In a sudden Orwellian twist, students across the country are now discovering that it’s not only acceptable, but morally praiseworthy to use intimidation,...

In March 2018, the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees adopted new rules that fatally undermine academic freedom. We authored this piece for the Martin Center explaining the damage the amendments would inflict on higher education in the state. Unfortunately, the Board of Trustees ignored our warning, a warning reiterated by numerous other faculty and academic organizations. So earlier this month, three of our colleagues filed a lawsuit that seeks to bar application of the revisions to faculty with tenure or who were on the tenure track at the time the changes were adopted. Should the lawsuit succeed, some of...

Students at my college demanded a review of my tenure because of an article I wrote. My fellow faculty members failed to back me up Sarah Lawrence College claims that its mission is to graduate students who are, ‘diverse in every definition of the word.’ Unfortunately, recent events which have been in the national eye, suggest otherwise. And this story involves me. Seizing on an op-ed I wrote for The New York Times a few months ago, in which I questioned the lack of ideological balance of the school’s extracurricular programming, a group of student protesters calling themselves the Diaspora...

At last, McAdams v. Marquette University is over, and the outcome is heartening for Americans who cherish free speech and adherence to contracts. Conversely, it has those who believe that speech that ofends any politically correct sensibilities must be punished gnashing their teeth. The Martin Center has been covering this case since it broke nearly four years ago, first with this piece by one of McAdams’ colleagues, Howard Kainz. To briefly recount the facts of the case, Marquette banished from campus and sought to revoke the tenure of a political science professor and terminate his employment merely because of a...

The Chinese government wants to polish its terribly tarnished image and one of the tactics it has been using is to influence the education of American college students. Since 2004, the Chinese have been sponsoring “Confucius Institutes” at colleges and universities around the world that are willing to host them. A Chinese government agency pays for most if not all of the cost of the programs that cover Chinese language, culture and history. Since many students want to learn about China, that seems like a good deal that saves the school money. Read more....

A teacher’s assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada was chastised after she showed a video of two professors from the University of Toronto, Jordan Peterson and Nicholas Matte, debating the use of gender-specific pronouns. She was teaching on that subject in a communications class. The university president has offered an apology. Lindsay Shepherd, the TA in question, was called into a meeting with staff and faculty. She secretly recorded the meeting. She told them, in part: "I don’t see how someone would rationally think it was threatening. I could see how it might challenge their existing ideas. But for...

Recently on the academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Hank Reichman ran some thoughts on academic freedom that Albert Einstein delivered more than half a century ago. If Reichman's hope in doing so was to provide comfort to progressives, the ironic effect is that, although that may have been the target audience in the 1950s, modern-day conservatives, particularly in the academy, are more likely to identify with Einsten's observations. "The threat to academic freedom in our time must be seen in the fact that, because of the alleged external danger to our country, freedom of...

MADISON, Wis. — Still fighting for his speech and contractual rights two years after Marquette University drove him out of the classroom, Professor John McAdams will receive a top national academic freedom prize Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland. McAdams will be awarded the Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick Award for Academic Freedom for his outspoken criticism of political correctness on college campuses. “Professor McAdams is a fearless defender of free speech and open inquiry, and a martyr to political correctness,” said Richard Graber, president and CEO of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which supports the Kirkpatrick Award. “His dismissal from Marquette University...

The next time a college professor starts lecturing on the importance of a free and open marketplace of ideas beware. He’s probably going to offer a few platitudes before he throws in an awkward “but,” and then shows his true beliefs about free expression. As a general rule, you can ignore everything that comes before the word “but.” It is usually after he utters his first “but” that he really starts to show his ass. At Western Carolina University (WCU) the faculty senate recently showed its true colors on an important issue of academic freedom. They were approached with an...