Violating the First Amendment will cost you. Universities and other public institutions are learning this lesson the hard way as the dust settles on a series of lawsuits brought by university faculty and staff who were punished for their comments about Charlie Kirk’s murder last September.
The recent report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences has renewed the debate over the internal politicization of academe. As one of its authors (speaking only for myself), I find the report relatively tepid.
Can faculty lead the reform of higher education from the inside — and if so, who checks whom?
Her confidence in handling that potential tinderbox, and others like it, impressed the trustees of Columbia University, who appointed Dr. Mnookin to be the 21st president, a role she starts on Wednesday. It is also emblematic of the deliberative leadership style she will seek to pursue at Columbia, she said in a wide-ranging interview last week.
Just 10 years ago, almost 60 percent of Americans said they had a lot of confidence in higher education. By last year, that number had fallen to 42 percent. Seventy percent of Americans told Pew last fall that higher education is moving in the wrong direction.
Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment Wednesday against eight pro-Palestinian activists who are accused of conspiring to run a criminal intimidation campaign against University of Michigan officials while trying to force the school to cut financial ties to Israel.
The indictment describes threats and vandalism at officials’ homes, some businesses and the Jewish Federation of Detroit. The document highlights several incidents that made headlines in the past few years, including fake bloody corpses that were placed in an elected university board member’s yard and the spray-painting of anti-Israel messages at the home of the school’s president at the time, Santa Ono.