Boston Globe: Parole rules halt terrorist’s talk
Can’t leave Maine to visit UMass
In another twist to a free-speech controversy that has roiled the governor and people across the state, Ray Luc Levasseur said he will not speak at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst today, obeying parole orders to stay in his home state of Maine. It is the second cancellation in six days of the convicted terrorist’s appearance at the state’s flagship campus.
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Posted in Free speech
Tagged Free speech
Boston Globe: Patrick assails new UMass invitation for convicted terrorist
Governor Deval Patrick today assailed the speaking invitation that a group of UMass Amherst faculty extended to a convicted terrorist, even after criticism from state and university leaders scuttled earlier plans for a speech.
“I am more than a little disappointed about this invitation having been extended,” Patrick said at a State House news conference. “I fully get the point, and respect the idea of free speech. But I think it is a reflection of profound insensitivity to continue to try and have this former terrorist on the campus.”
Ray Luc Levasseur, the founder and former leader of the radical revolutionary group United Freedom Front, is scheduled to speak Thursday night. An earlier invitation for him to speak at a library symposium was canceled last week amid pressure from Patrick’s office and from family members of victims of his group’s attacks, which included the April 1976 blast on the third floor of the Suffolk County Courthouse that injured two dozen people.
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Posted in Free speech
Tagged Free speech, Ray Luc Levasseur, UMass Amherst
Inside Higher Ed: More Anger After College Statement on Suspension of 4 Profs
Southwestern College, a community college outside San Diego, has been under fire since last week’s suspension of four faculty members, following a protest that criticized the administration. With professors saying that they are being punished for expressing their views, the college late Monday issued a new statement — but that statement (while noting that one suspension has been lifted) only further angered the professors. The statement says: “Four faculty members were placed on paid administrative leave on Thursday, October 22, 2009, and three faculty members remain on paid administrative leave at this time, pending the outcome of the investigation. Please understand that no formal charges or allegations have been made against any College faculty member or employee at this time. The student rally held between 11 a.m. and 12 p.m. on October 22, 2009, is not the focus of the investigation. The college is investigating safety and security issues that arose after the approved organized student rally. The college respects, values and is committed to lawful free expression and the student rally provided an opportunity for our students to voice their concerns and to underscore the challenges that all community college students, and community colleges, are experiencing. The college is committed to maintaining a safe environment for our students and staff, which is the focus of the investigation.”
College officials did not respond to requests for clarifications on the statement. But Philip Lopez, an English professor who is president of the faculty union, said that the statement only added to the questions about the incident. If the college is now on record as saying that there are no charges or allegations, why is it appropriate to remove faculty members from their classes and ban them from campus, he asked. Lopez said this action violates basic due process rights. “If there are no charges, why were we placed on leave?,” he asked. “Rumor? Reputation? Union-busting? Poor personal hygiene?”
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Posted in Budgets & Funding, Protests
Tagged Budgets & Funding, faculty suspensions, Free speech, Southwestern College
Inside Higher Ed: Can Free Speech Be Furloughed?
On Thursday, several hundred students at Southwestern College, a community college outside of San Diego, held a peaceful protest over budget cuts that are leading to the cancellation of more than 400 additional course sections next semester. On Friday, the students got a sign that someone was paying attention to the protest, but they didn’t get the response they wanted: Four faculty members were immediately suspended and barred from the campus or using the campus e-mail system.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding, Free speech
Tagged Budgets & Funding, faculty suspensions, Free speech, Protests, Southwestern College
Grand Rapids Press: Calvin College Faculty Senate asks college to drop order on teaching about homosexuality and same-sex marriage
Calvin College professors are asking the board of trustees to withdraw a memo ordering them to follow the Christian Reformed Church’s teachings against homosexuality and same-sex marriages.
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Posted in Academic freedom
Tagged Academic freedom, Calvin College, Free speech, same-sex marriage, Sexuality
Inside Higher Ed: Saint Louis U. Blocks David Horowitz Event
David Horowitz is getting backing from his usual critics after Saint Louis University sought to change or block (depending on who you are talking to) a planned lecture he was scheduled to give next week on the campus.
The event — “An Evening with David Horowitz: Islamo-Fascism Awareness and Civil Rights” — was organized by the College Republications and Young America’s Foundation, which say they were banned from hosting Horowitz. The university denies that it banned Horowitz, but acknowledges that it told the students that they should modify the event.
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Posted in Free speech
Tagged David Horowitz, Free speech, Saint Louis U
Inside Higher Ed: The Press and Morgan State U.
At Morgan State University, the student newspaper’s adviser was respected by the student journalists and went to bat for them in fights with the administration. Now the adviser is out of a job — and a national journalism group is today censuring the university, saying that it got rid of Denise Brown for doing her job.
College Media Advisers, the national group that represents people like Brown, conducted an investigation of why her employment ended on June 30, gathering documents, interviewing some players in the situation, and offering to mediate a settlement (an offer that the university declined), and then today issuing a report with its censure decision on the university. The report calls Morgan State’s policies “legally questionable” and says that they denied student journalists the right of free expression and resulted in the unfair termination of Brown from her position.
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Posted in Free speech
Tagged Free speech, journalism, Morgan State U, Student newspapers, Termination
AP: Iranian-American academic detained in Tehran
NEW YORK (AP) — An Iranian-American scholar whom Iran once accused of fomenting political unrest has been arrested by authorities there for the second time in two years, his family said Friday.
Security forces arrested Kian Tajbakhsh late Thursday, a family member told The Associated Press. The relative was in contact with Tajbakhsh’s wife, who witnessed the arrest in Tehran.
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Posted in Faculty, Free speech, Government
Tagged Faculty, Free speech, Iran, political unrest, professors detained
World University News: MEXICO: Academic censored and threatened
Florencio Posadas Segura, a professor at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa in Mexico, has been censured after speaking on the university radio station, Radio UAS. On 13 and 15 May, he commented on the topic of new university regulations, including the issue of succession of the rector, saying that they had not passed democratic and academic tests. Segura was then severely reprimanded by the university authorities.
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Posted in Free speech
Tagged Free speech, Mexico
The Chronicle News Blog: Proposed Bias Policy Stirs Controversy at U. of Nevada at Las Vegas
The University of Nevada at Las Vegas is revisiting a proposed policy dealing with bias and hate crimes in response to fears that it invites First Amendment violations, but faculty leaders there remain concerned that campus administrators will end up curtailing free speech.
The chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education, James E. Rogers, urged UNLV officials to rewrite the proposed policy last week, after free-speech concerns were raised by faculty leaders, the state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, and editorials published in the Las Vegas Sun and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. A Sun report quoted Chancellor Rogers as saying he was “very, very uncomfortable” with the proposed policy, which he called “far too restrictive.”
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Posted in Free speech
Tagged ACLU, Free speech, Governance, UNLV
The Chronicle: Head of Anti-Defamation League Urged Santa Barbara to Act Against Critic of Israel
The Jewish advocacy group’s representative met with campus officials nd urged them to investigate a professor for academic misconduct after he e-mailed students with harsh criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza.
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Posted in Academic freedom
Tagged Academic freedom, academic misconduct, ADF, Free speech, Israel, Persecution
Worcester Telegram: Gaza talk rescheduled at Clark U.
WORCESTER — Acknowledging “the process could have been better,” Clark University President John Bassett has approved rescheduling the appearance of a controversial scholar and author whose talk he had canceled two weeks ago.
After learning earlier this month that the Students for Palestinian Rights planned to bring Norman Finkelstein to campus Thursday, the first night of a university-sponsored Holocaust and genocide studies conference, Mr. Bassett nixed the student organization’s plans.
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Posted in Free speech
Tagged Clark University, Free speech, Gaza, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Norman Finkelstein
The Chronicle: Students at Cedarville U. Suspend Newspaper to Protest Censorship
Editors of the student newspaper at Cedarville University, a Baptist institution in Ohio, opted to suspend publication of the semester’s final issue on Thursday to protest tightening censorship by the administration.
“Because of the increasing amount of pressure to print only specific things, the editors decided not to print a last issue,” said Rebecca High, a graduating senior and editor of the newspaper’s Viewpoints section.
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Posted in Free speech
Tagged Cedarville U, censorship, Free speech, Student newspapers
The Chronicle News Blog: AAUP Warns Colleges Not to Rescind Speaker Invitations
Gary Rhoades, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, today issued a statement warning colleges and universities not to rescind invitations to speakers in the face of controversy.
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Posted in Free speech
Tagged AAUP, Free speech
Chicago Tribune: Chicago State’s student newspaper, Tempo, is back on stands as controversy lingers
Chicago State students delivered the first new issue of Tempo in weeks as the editor in chief and the newspaper’s former faculty adviser remain embroiled in a lawsuit against the school
The student editor carted stacks of newspapers across the Chicago State University campus, filling newsstands that have been empty for two months.
Passersby tried to read the cover of Tempo before it hit the stands this week, missing it since it stopped publishing amid battles with university administrators.
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Posted in Legal issues
Tagged Chicago State, Free speech, Lawsuit, Student newspapers
Inside Higher Ed: Carolina Chancellor Apologizes for Speech Disruption
Protesters disrupted a speech Tuesday at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by former Rep. Tom Tancredo, a leader of the movement to limit benefits to those who do not have the legal right to live in the United States. Video posted on YouTube shows the incident, which led Tancredo to stop his talk. Holden Thorp, chancellor at Chapel Hill, called Tancredo to apologize for the incident Friday. Thorp issued a statement Wednesday strongly condemning the protest for blocking the talk, and vowing that the incident would be investigated. “We expect protests about controversial subjects at Carolina. That’s part of our culture,” he said. “But we also pride ourselves on being a place where all points of view can be expressed and heard. There’s a way to protest that respects free speech and allows people with opposing views to be heard. Here that’s often meant that groups protesting a speaker have displayed signs or banners, silently expressing their opinions while the speaker had his or her say. That didn’t happen last night.”
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Posted in Protests
Tagged Free speech, Protests
Inside Higher Ed: Patterns in Academic Persecution
The Scholar Rescue Fund drew applications from oppressed academics in 101 different countries in its first five years of operations, suggesting “at least a low level of scholar persecution in a surprisingly wide range of countries and regions” — although it’s most prevalent in the Middle East/North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Scholars from the two regions accounted for 61 percent of all applicants from 2002-7 and 73 percent of grantees.
“Scholar Rescue in the Modern World,” a report being released today by the Institute of International Education (home of the Scholar Rescue Fund), identifies such trends in reported persecution across 847 grant applications. The Scholar Rescue Fund awards fellowships for scholars to hold temporary academic posts abroad on the basis of the urgency of threats they face at home and the quality of their academic work. The report’s authors acknowledge the limitations of a small data set and of the fund’s reach — North Korea, for instance, is not represented in the application pool — but also assert the importance of gleaning what trends one can.
The Chronicle: For ‘Rescued’ Scholars, Persecution Came in Many Forms and Many Lands
A marine biologist in Ukraine was fired from his university position for studying mollusks in the bay near his institution, despite warnings from the government to focus his academic inquiries elsewhere.
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Posted in Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, Free speech, Government, Persecution
Times-Picayune: Ivor van Heerden, who pointed fingers in Hurricane Katrina levee failures, fired by LSU
Ivor van Heerden, the outspoken coastal scientist who led the state’s independent Team Louisiana investigation into Hurricane Katrina levee failures, has been notified by Louisiana State University that he will be terminated as a research professor in May 2010.
Van Heerden, who is not a tenured professor, also has been stripped of his title as deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center. Also, engineering professor Marc Levitan has stepped down as the center’s director. University officials say they will reshape the center’s research direction in the wake of the moves.
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Posted in Academic freedom
Tagged Academic freedom, Free speech, hurricane research, LSU, New Orleans, Research, Termination, Whitle-blowers
The Columbus Dispatch: Admissions officer puts newspaper in the trash
With prospective students and their parents visiting campus, an Ohio Wesleyan University employee decided he didn’t much care for a front-page story in the student newspaper.
Flanked by a photo of a beer bottle, The Transcript story detailed “The 50-Day Club,” a tradition in which seniors observe the days to graduation with two drinks a day at a Delaware bar.
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Posted in Free speech
Tagged Admissions, Free speech, Student newspapers
Inside Higher Ed: A Presidential Critic, Fired
After a career of 27 years teaching business at Stillman College, and despite holding a tenured position, Ekow O. Hayford was fired last year, in violation of his academic freedom, according to a report being issued today by the American Association of University Professors. The report found that Hayford was fired without due process after he publicly criticized the president of the college, a historically black institution in Alabama.
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Posted in Academic freedom, Free speech
Tagged AAUP, Academic freedom, Free speech, University presidents, Worker rights
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