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Dominic Coletti
FIRE
Duke’s fight against the Trump administration has a new front: employee speech. After the White House accused the school of maintaining unlawful racial preferences and cut millions of dollars in research funding as punishment, the University ordered its employees to keep silent.
In late August, Jenny Edmonds, Sanford School of Public Policy’s associate dean of communications and marketing, emailed faculty members that all requests about “Duke and current events” must go through the University’s PR office. She cited increased scrutiny on universities and their policies and admonished faculty to stay in their lanes, discussing only their research with the media. While Edmonds’s message was limited to the public policy school, faculty across the university got similar messages.
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Ghent University suspended postdoctoral scholar Nathan Cofnas as a “precautionary measure” pending a “preliminary disciplinary investigation.” The reason he is being suspended, however, has little if anything to do with him legitimately criticizing Jason Arday’s scholarship last month by documenting plagiarism in Arday’s doctoral thesis. Ghent is instead suspending Cofnas because his expressed public views are misaligned with the university’s values and therefore “creates a reputational risk”. This is not how academic freedom should work.
In July of this year, the American Association of University Professors endorsed Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate in Michigan’s Democratic primary election for U.S. Senate. Reactions from higher ed commentators played out exactly how you might expect: where defenders saw an obligatory bulwark of academic freedom against GOP incursions, critics saw an own-goal that only further justified those attacks.
However justified the AAUP’s decision may have seemed to some, new research suggests that it will only further fracture public trust in higher education.
