Stanford law dean targeted by student protesters after apologizing to Trump appointee for speech disruption https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-w...alifornia-jennifer-martinez-judge-kyle-duncan excerpt: more at the link
Sigh, what a failure of constitutional understanding by those students, and a failure of their prior professors.
https://www.bloomberglaw.com/bloomb...T32HG000000?bna_news_filter=us-law-week#jcite March 22, 2023, 12:57 PM Stanford Mandates Free Speech Training After Protest of US Judge Madison Alder Reporter Students protested Judge Kyle Duncan’s talk on campus Administrator who spoke at event put on leave, dean says Stanford Law School is requiring all students to attend educational programming on free speech after protesters interrupted a speech by a conservative federal judge earlier this month. The law school will hold “a mandatory half-day session in spring quarter for all students on the topic of freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession,” Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez said in a public letter to students Wednesday. Associate Dean Tirien Steinbach, who spoke at the March 9 event with US Judge Kyle Duncan, “is currently on leave,” Martinez said. The event, hosted by the school’s Federalist Society chapter, made headlines after videos appeared online of Duncan, a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, facing off with protesters supporting LGBTQ rights. Martinez and Stanford University’s President Marc Tessier-Lavigne later apologized to Duncan in a March 11 letter, saying the disruption was “inconsistent with” school policy that allows students protest but not disrupt speakers. One video of the event, posted by a video of the event posted by the conservative Ethics & Public Policy Center, shows Steinbach stepping in and speaking to the room. She told Duncan “your advocacy, your opinions from the bench, land as absolute disenfranchisement of their rights,” referring to the students. She also told Duncan he was welcome in the space. In her letter, Martinez said she was concerned about “hateful and threatening messages” Steinbach received. Martinez also said staff will receive training. The role of administrators present at future events “will be to ensure that university rules on disruption of events will be followed, and all staff will receive additional training in that regard,” Martinez said. To contact the reporter on this story: Madison Alder in Washington at malder@bloombergindustry.com
good interview, if you don't want to listen to the entire thing the first minute is the summary of his thoughts on higher ed and getting a college education. Martial arts enthusiasts may enjoy the discussion of jiu jitsu sprinkled throughout.
Question before watching. Could he have made this same video in terms of rhetorical content with sightly different terminology appropriate for the time in the 40s like other right wing free speech grifters from before?
Cornell’s classroom trigger warnings are a disaster for free speech https://nypost.com/2023/03/31/cornell-university-to-require-trigger-warnings-in-classes/
The concept of trigger warnings is really antithetical to the entire premise of academic freedom. If you have trauma in your life it is your responsibility to overcome it, not expect the world to cowtow to your sensibilities. That being said, you could not ask for a more stereotypical looking "College Republicans President" than this dweeb:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/cornel...kotlikoff-9cca7d88?mod=hp_opin_pos_6#cxrecs_s Cornell’s Academic Freedom Test Trigger warning: Students will have to hear new ideas. By The Editorial Board April 4, 2023 at 6:47 pm ET Diversity enforcers have become speech enforcers on many college campuses, but a few schools are starting to articulate some limits. The latest is Cornell University, which has refused to adopt a student resolution that would have required “trigger warnings” anytime an upsetting subject is mentioned in the classroom. Under the proposal, professors would have been required to warn students in advance about “traumatic” content that touched on topics like self-harm, domestic, racial or transphobic violence and homophobic harassment. Professors would have been even more nervous than they already are that any open-format classroom discussion or debate might wander into trigger territory. The entire idea of a trigger warning for speech is antithetical to the idea of a university, and in a previous age no one would have taken it seriously. But this is era of woke censorship, so it’s news when campus leaders push back, as they have at Cornell. “Learning to engage with difficult and challenging ideas is a core part of a university education: essential to our students’ intellectual growth, and to their future ability to lead and thrive in a diverse society,” Cornell President Martha Pollack and Provost Michael Kotlikoff wrote in rejecting the resolution. Academic freedom, they note, means that professors get to choose their course content as well as how they present it to their students. In recent weeks, Stanford University and Columbia University have had to tangle with students who felt triggered by exposure to conservative judges. Stanford law students shouted down federal Judge Kyle Duncan while Columbia students have called on the universityto take down a social media post that includes members of the school’s Federalist Society meeting with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In both instances, the universities stood by policies protecting free expression on campus. Cornell’s policy on free speech notes Cornell values “free and open inquiry and expression—tenets that underlie academic freedom—even of ideas some may consider wrong or offensive.” Research has shown that trigger warnings aren’t effective at helping people manage their anxiety, and including such warnings in an academic environment encourages emotional fragility and intellectual cowardice. It also teaches students and faculty to self-censor. Cornell’s position is good news, but these bad ideas will recur as long as the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy governs academia, pushing the notion that honest speech and debate are traumatic. If universities want to reclaim real intellectual openness on campus, they have to help students get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Should College Come With Trigger Warnings? At Cornell, It’s a ‘Hard No.’ When the student assembly voted to require faculty to alert students to upsetting educational materials, administrators pushed back. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/...rigger-warnings-at-cornell-its-a-hard-no.html
https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvar...ha-madras-6ac96bc4?mod=hp_opin_pos_4#cxrecs_s Harvard Has a Free Speech Moment Fifty professors form an alliance on academic freedom. By The Editorial Board April 12, 2023 at 6:49 pm ET Conservatives are so few at American universities that the battle to restore respect for free and open debate will have to be led by what used to be known as traditional liberals. Well, maybe there’s hope. On Wednesday Harvard University said it’s forming a new faculty-led Council on Academic Freedom dedicated to the free exchange of ideas as a cornerstone of “reason and rational discourse.” In an op-ed for the Boston Globe, Harvard professors Steven Pinker and Bertha Madraswrite that “an academic establishment that stifles debate betrays the privileges that the nation grants it.” Free speech, they write, is also essential to human progress. Intellectual orthodoxy “is bound to provide erroneous guidance on vital issues like pandemics, violence, gender, and inequality.” The professors note that although they are comfortable with expressing controversial or unorthodox views, others on campus are not. Tenure no doubt helps. But the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy is powerful at Harvard and the school ranks 170 out of 203 in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s free speech list. Mr. Pinker and Ms. Madras acknowledge the school has had “cases of disinvitation, sanctioning, harassment, public shaming, and threats of firing and boycotts for the expression of disfavored opinions.” The academic freedom group includes former Harvard president and Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, former dean of the Harvard Faculty of Medicine Jeffrey Flier, law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, economist Gregory Mankiw, social ethics professor Mahzarin R. Banaji and Islamic intellectual history professor Khaled El-Rouayheb, among others across the ideological spectrum. This is progress, but the message will have to spread across the school’s administration and especially the student body. Students at many colleges these days operate like Red Guards in China’s Cultural Revolution. Being unwoke is socially punished. Breaking that culture of conformity will take reinforcement across the institution. There’s ample reason to be skeptical, and we’ll believe it when we see it. But if Harvard’s faculty is recommitting the school to the bedrock principles of university life, hear, hear. Appeared in the April 13, 2023, print edition as 'Harvard Has a Free Speech Moment'.
Althouse "What was unique about the Cornell situation is they rapidly turned in a response that was a 'hard no.'"
Cost of Ivy Leagues nears $90K a year https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3926232-cost-of-ivy-leagues-nears-90k-a-year/
Promising Signs for Free Speech on Campus https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/opinion/free-speech-campus-universities-promising-news.html
WaPo https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/29/university-campus-free-speech-censorship-fight/ Opinion : These universities are pushing back on censorious students. Finally. By the Editorial Board April 29, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EDT In March, a Cornell University sophomore and member of the undergraduate student assembly saw a friend become visibly disturbed while reading “The Surrendered,” a Chang-rae Lee novel with a graphic rape scene. So she spearheaded a resolution that “implores all instructors to provide content warnings on the syllabus for any traumatic content that may be discussed.” On the surface, this story has all the trappings of a wider phenomenon increasingly prevalent on American university campuses: the curtailing of academic inquiry, and sometimes even free speech, for the protection of perceived student “sensitivities” — invisible boundaries whose contours are never quite clear but almost always couched as barriers against “harm.” What happened next is cause for celebration: The Cornell administration immediately struck down this resolution, a welcome reminder that academic institutions have the power to defend their fundamental values — and are willing to use it. “We cannot accept this resolution as the actions it recommends would infringe on our core commitment to academic freedom and freedom of inquiry, and are at odds with the goals of a Cornell education,” wrote Cornell’s president, Martha E. Pollack, and its provost, Michael I. Kotlikoff, in a letter rejecting the student assembly’s plea for trigger warnings. Although they did note, understandably, that “in some cases faculty may wish to provide notice,” an outright trigger warning requirement, they noted, “would have a chilling effect on faculty, who would naturally fear censure lest they bring a discussion spontaneously into new and challenging territory, or fail to accurately anticipate students’ reaction to a topic or idea.” Across the country, a growing number of administrations and faculties at universities both private and public alike are beginning to do the same, waking up to the realization that academic freedom needs to be protected, and that student outrage on social media should not dictate university policy. Earlier this month, Neeli Bendapudi, the president of Penn State, released a recorded statement defending her university’s embrace of controversial speakers. The Supreme Court, she reminded her viewers, has long held that public universities such as Penn State are bound by the First Amendment. But she also reiterated a moral reason to continue welcoming diverse, and even offensive, opinions: “For centuries, higher education has fought against censorship and for the principle that the best way to combat speech is with more speech.” A similar defense is being waged at private institutions. At Harvard University, a group of more than 50 faculty members last month established the Council on Academic Freedom, a group “devoted to free inquiry, intellectual diversity, and civil discourse.” Vanderbilt University, likewise, announced last month that it would become the U.S. foothold for the Future of Free Speech project, an initiative of the Danish think tank Justitia. “For a university to do its work, faculty and students must have maximum freedom to share their ideas, assert their opinions, and challenge conventional wisdom — and one another,” said Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier in a statement. It’s true, of course, that the social justice movement in general, spurred in part by the brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020, has brought a much-needed change in perspective to the American academy, inspiring faculties to expand course offerings and hiring committees to seek out scholars from diverse backgrounds. But those changes, all necessary efforts to make more students feel welcome on campuses, have sometimes gone hand in hand with tacit limits on what can be said, questioned or even written in university settings. According to “The Academic Mind in 2022: What Faculty Think About Free Expression and Academic Freedom on Campus,” a national survey of approximately 1,500 faculty members at four-year colleges and universities conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy group, one third of those polled feel they cannot express their opinions based on potential reaction from other members of their university communities — while more than half expressed concern about being fired because of someone misunderstanding a comment. A turning point of sorts seems to have come in March, when Jenny Martinez, the dean of Stanford Law School, courageously doubled down on defending her decision to apologize to Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee with an admittedly abysmal record who had come to Palo Alto only to be heckled nonstop by law students. “Some students might feel that some points should not be up for argument and therefore that they should not bear the responsibility of arguing them,” she wrote in a 10-page letter. But saying that certain points are somehow beyond the pale of acceptable argumentation “is incompatible with the training that must be delivered in a law school.” Thankfully, trigger warnings and other such measures are not always successful in taking root. But, at least in certain universities, they’ve triggered long-overdue defenses of unimpeded academic inquiry. For far too long, administrators and professors have been silent. Not anymore.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/is-it-time-to-retire-academic-tenure Is it Time to Retire Academic Tenure? Some Republicans and university administrators seem to think so. I do not. ROGER PIELKE JR. MAY 3, 2023 A college basketball player has far more chance of playing professionally than does a PhD recipient of becoming a tenure-track faculty member at a U.S. university. That’s the result of an eye-opening analysis I did in 2015. Since then, the math has only gotten worse for those seeking permanent academic faculty positions — PhD production continues to increase at a rate faster than the number of tenure-track positions. Then there is strong opposition to the very idea of tenure among Republicans (and a few Democrats) in states like Florida, North Carolina, and Texas where state legislatures are proposing to eliminate the practice. Hostile politicians aside, many universities are reducing the number of tenure-track faculty positions in favor of lower-paid and easily dismissed “contingent” lecturers. Given these trends, might it be time to do away with the notion of academic tenure altogether? Put me down as a hard “No.” Republicans and university administrators are playing a dangerous game in their actions to reduce or eliminate tenure at U.S. universities. But we academics can also be part of the problem as some university faculty seem to dislike tenure and academic freedom as much as Republicans do when they encounter those expressing heterodox views. Today, I’ll start a discussion of tenure and academic freedom from my vantage point as a long-time tenured full professor at a major U.S. research university. The observations below include some analysis, but also some deeply personal observations based on my experiences. I welcome comments and responses, from those inside the academy and those outside as well. more at the link
Tenure is f***ed by old fogeys who won't retire keeping spaces unavailable for young professors to access tenure like the old fogeys were able to back in the day.
Article cut off halfway for me... Why is tenure important? To answer this question I am going to discuss some of my experiences that I have not shared very often in public. Most everyone is aware that I was investigated by Congress and attacked by the Obama White House. Academic freedom backstopped by tenure is why I survived professionally from those experiences. But academic tenure exists not simply to protect us from meddling politicians, but also to protect us from ourselves when we lose sight within the academy of what academic freedom is and why it matters. Let’s spill some tea . . . Keep reading with a 7-day free trial Subscribe to The Honest Broker to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives. Already a paid subscriber? Sign in
