Your Cart is Empty
Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed
Note: This is another perspective on ‘Porter v. Board of Trustees of North Carolina State University.’
Excerpt: A divided federal appeals court has ruled against a professor who alleged North Carolina State University retaliated against him for three instances of him speaking his mind.
Those were: pushing back on adding a diversity question to student course evaluations, criticizing a colleague department-wide regarding an Inside Higher Ed article and writing a blog post titled “ASHE Has Become a Woke Joke.” In the 2-1 opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit dismissed the lawsuit Porter filed against the university and a few current and former employees there. Porter argued that he “has been effectively siloed into a program area of study that is drained of students and resources,” the majority opinion said.
Comments will be approved before showing up.
I recently listened to Ross Douthat’s interview with the philosopher Jennifer Frey. She is a serious thinker and an unusually courageous academic entrepreneur. What she built at the University of Tulsa before it was dismantled is exactly the sort of thing more universities should be attempting. Yet almost every argument she offered for the humanities is, I think, completely unpersuasive to anyone not already on our side of the table.
This report presents findings from a national survey of 1,959 law school faculty at 192 American Bar Association (ABA) approved law schools in the United States, conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). As one of the largest surveys of law faculty on free expression and professional norms, the data reveal a profession that strongly endorses free speech principles while struggling to live them out in practice.
I just returned from the University of Wyoming, where I debated the President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Todd Wolfson over the need for colleges and universities to maintain institutional neutrality. The debate was organized by the Steamboat Institute and was live-streamed.
The formal question presented for debate was: “Is institutional neutrality necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry rather than an actor in political disputes?” I spoke in favor of institutional neutrality while Wolfson argued against it as a necessary component to higher education.
