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Jay Bhattacharya & Wesley J. Smith
RealClearPolitics
The New England Journal of Medicine recently published an advocacy article that attacks academic freedom and urges stifling contentious campus debates. Specifically, Evan Mullen, Eric J. Topol, and Abraham Verghese urge universities to “speak out publicly” and issue official institutional opinions about public controversies involving its professors “when it concludes that a faculty member’s opinion could cause public harm.”
There is a growth sector in American higher education. The number of “Civics Centers” has exploded in the last decade, and especially since 2021.
What are these civics centers, and what explains their proliferation now?
Heterodox Academy (HxA), the leading non-partisan higher education reform organization in the US for faculty, staff and students, championing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement, has decided to provide some answers.
In February of this year, a few colleagues and I co-founded a group called Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff (CJFS), which now has more than 200 members on more than two dozen campuses. Our group, which is predominantly made up of academics at Massachusetts colleges and universities but includes members from across New England, is one of several such efforts nationwide that have coalesced into a new National Campus Jewish Alliance.
We recognize that Jewish safety is inseparable from the safety of all people, and we work to foster academic environments that reduce antisemitism by treating educators as partners, not as suspects.
