The Brian Leiter-Paul Campos feud continues into the New Year. The latest: Campos is threatening to disclose “potentially very embarrassing personal information” about Leiter should the latter disclose the personal identity of “Dybbuk,” the pseudonym of a lawyer/”scamblogger” accused of harassing another law professor in blog posts and comments. Could this constitute blackmail? I’ll leave […]
Archive | Academia
CWRU President and Provost Reject Academic Boycott of Israel
By Jonathan H. Adler on December 27, 2013 8:55 am in Academia, Freedom of Speech at Colleges and Universities, Israel
In a statement e-mailed to faculty and other members of the university community, Case Western Reserve University President Barbara Snyder and Provost Bud Baeslack forcefully rejected calls for an academic boycott of Israel. As they note, academic boycotts of this sort run contrary to principles of academic freedom and “seek to subvert one of higher […]
Northwestern Can’t Quit ASA Over Boycott Because it is Not a Member
By Eugene Kontorovich on December 22, 2013 11:58 am in Academia, Anti-Semitism, Freedom of Speech, Israel
Northwestern University recently condemned the American Studies Association boycott of Israel. Unlike some other schools that quit their institutional membership in the ASA over the boycott, Northwestern has not. Many of my Northwestern colleagues were about to start urging a similar withdrawal. Then we learned from our administration that despite being listed as in institutional […]
Northwestern University Rejects Israel Boycotts
I am proud to say Northwestern University has strongly rejected the American Studies Association and other proposed boycotts of Israel, and reaffirmed its ties to Israel institutions. The following statement was released Friday by Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro and Provost Dan Linzer (emphasis mine): Recently the membership of the American Studies Association approved a […]
American Studies Association Faces Consequences from its Boycott
I previously posted about the proposed boycott of Israeli institutions by the American Studies Association, which was approved by a vote of its membership over the weekend. The boycott is pretty lame; it’s supposed to be in solidarity with the international boycott movement advocated by Palestinian “civil society” organizations, which calls for a complete cultural […]
George Mason Law School Freezes Tuition
Here’s the press release: Visitors Freeze George Mason Law Tuition Fairfax, VA – December 11, 2013: The Board of Visitors of George Mason University voted today at its quarterly meeting to freeze the tuition of the law school for the upcoming year, for current and incoming students, and it declared its intention not to increase […]
BDS Opponent Claire Potter Suffers Social Media Harassment for Her Views
then changes her mind on the American Studies Association boycott resolution, perhaps for other reasons. But the entire situation is worth reviewing, given that BDS supporters are constantly claiming that pro-Israel forces are the ones doing the harassing, vilification, etc. Via Legal Insurrection, here are a couple of quotes from Potter about the reaction to […]
Taranto on a Kangaroo Court at Auburn University
If you missed this great column by James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal, here’s your chance to read it. I had my own run-in with university kangaroo justice, fortunately much less serious than what Taranto describes. Just before I was going to graduate college, a friend with whom I had a falling out chose […]
The American Studies Association and the Pending, Watered Down, Israel Boycott
I wrote this for the Manhattan Institute’s excellent Minding the Campus site, and figured I’d repost it here. From the bowels of academia comes news that the National Council of the American Studies Association has voted in favor of boycotting Israeli institutions. The boycott resolution goes to the full membership for an up or down […]
Lisa Duggan, NYU and Curtis Marez, UC San Diego: Deserve to be Boycotted?
Duggan is the president-elect of the American Studies Association and Marez is the president. According to this Inside Higher Ed piece, they both support a pending motion to have the ASA endorse a boycott of Israeli universities. If the IHE piece is correct, I think they should be treated by all academics (and others) of […]
Arthur Schlesinger and the Kennedy Assassination
The events of November 1963 and their aftermath are described in Chapter 9 of my undergraduate thesis The Highbrow in American Politics: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the Role of the Intellectual in Politics. In brief: Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, and most of the rest of the White House immediately leaped to the conclusion that “the radical […]
Expanded the Range of Respectable Opinion in Constitutional Discourse
As Ilya noted yesterday, all the authors wrote postscripts for the book, some long, some short. Here’s my short one, focusing on the importance of blogs like the VC to expanding the range of “respectable opinion” in constitutional discourse: In 2011, a law professor at Yale, defending Obamacare from constitutional challenge, claimed that only one […]
Speaking of the Scalia Interview… Three Originalists on the Harvard Faculty?
Scalia: I don’t know how much progress I’ve made on originalism. That’s to be seen. I do think originalism is more respectable than it was. But there’s still only two justices up here who are thoroughgoing originalists. I do think things are better than they were. For example, I truly thought I’d never see an […]
Off-GPA-Balance-Sheet: Splitting the Higher Education Tension Between Education and Credential Through Online Education
By Kenneth Anderson on September 26, 2013 8:48 pm in Academia, Education, Higher Education, Online Education
The New York Times has a useful article today on MOOCs – Massive Open Online Courses. Reporter Alan Finder points out that online education has been around in one form or another for a decade. What’s different today is the rise of the MOOCs; the article walks through the three leading MOOC providers – EdX, […]
How’s George Mason Law School Doing?
I’ve received some concerned email from friends, after the Washington Post published an article about how D.C.-area law schools are struggling to get students. In particular the article stated that our class size has shrunk from 303 in 2010 to 151 today, suggesting that we have lost half of our tuition revenue. The article is […]