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A new national coalition, the Alliance for Higher Education, announced its launch Tuesday, promising to defend higher education from government interference.
The nonprofit’s mission is to protect higher ed’s role in fostering democracy by ensuring that colleges and universities have academic freedom, autonomy and opportunity for all students to learn and succeed, said Mike Gavin, the organization’s inaugural president and CEO. “Our goal—the joke I’ve been making—is to make things less bad,” Gavin told Inside Higher Ed. “But in the long run, what we want to see is” higher ed making good on its “democratic promises.”
The recent news about plummeting math preparation among University of California, San Diego, students was startling: Over five years, the number of incoming students deemed to need remedial math courses before taking calculus had risen from 32 in 2020 to more than 900 last fall.
Math achievement declines across the country are real, but data from a single campus is not representative, even if it makes national news. In fact, UCSD offers a poor reference point for policy discussions in California and most other states, given how unique its approach to math proficiency has been.
A UNC System Board of Governors committee on Wednesday advanced a proposal to define “academic freedom” across the state’s public universities, despite pushback from a faculty group and their lawyers. The policy, which heads to the full board for consideration next month, includes the definition that the system’s Faculty Assembly approved in October.
In part, the explanation reads that “academic freedom is the foundational principle that protects the rights of all faculty to engage in teaching, research/creative activities, service, and scholarly inquiry without undue influence.” But the system added sections that would set the “parameters” of academic freedom for faculty and its “protections” for students, such as the freedom to “take reasoned exception” to ideas presented in their classes.
Pity Chris Summerlin, the dean of students at the University of Florida. He’s being sued by an anti-Semite, and that’s not the worst of his predicament. So far, judges who have ruled on the case have given mixed verdicts on whether he is likely to win or lose at trial.
College deans and administrators keep confronting the same dilemma: They face intense pressure to punish speech that elicits fear or moral disgust on campus. They also have legal obligations—and face countervailing pressure—to refrain from violating the free-speech rights of students. They cannot always do both. The result is cases such as Damsky v. Summerlin—cases that might be avoided under a better approach to fighting anti-Semitism and other hateful ideas.
Northwestern University’s “Black Friday” agreement to pay $75 million to the Trump administration in exchange for regaining access to about $790 million in federal research funding raises free speech concerns, experts say.
“Northwestern has allowed its institutional judgment in terms of academic freedom, in terms of student speech, in terms of admissions criteria... to be overriden by the demands of the federal government, and that raises serious First Amendment problems,” said Northwestern law professor Heidi Kitrosser, a constitutional law expert.
In December, UC Berkeley administrators handed down a six-month suspension without pay to Peyrin Kao, a 26-year-old computer science lecturer, after finding that he had violated university policy by making pro-Palestinian comments to students in a classroom after class and advertising that he was participating in a hunger strike.
We asked two UC Berkeley professors with opposing views, Christopher Kutz and Erwin Chemerinsky, to succinctly lay out their case in support, or in opposition, to the measure.
