This guide for trustees reports on the dangerous decline of academic freedom and intellectual diversity on college campuses. The foreword, by Benno Schmidt, chairman of the CUNY Board of Trustees and former president of Yale, comes at a time when duly-invited graduation speakers are made unwelcome, campus speech codes threaten the free exchange of ideas, and academic freedom controversies are emerging on a number of campuses. The guide features key documents that shaped the modern concept of academic freedom, coupled with commentary from a wide and bipartisan roster of distinguished educators, attorneys, and policymakers including former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers, U.S. Circuit Judge Jose Cabranes, CUNY board chairman and former president of Yale, Benno Schmidt, and the co-founders of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate. The report accompanied a conference on the same subject held in New York City on April 25, 2013.
This report features ten best practices, gleaned from colleges and universities across the country, for promoting the free exchange of ideas in and out of the classroom. Since intellectual diversity is at the core of any true university education, the report commends institutions that have taken action, urges them to keep at it, and exhorts […]
ACTA’s new guide for higher education trustees, Guarding the Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Hear by Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm of the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, provides best practices to boards of trustees for securing intellectual freedom on the American college campus. It couldn’t have come a moment too soon. Since 2016 […]
Polarizing political beliefs are nothing new on campus, but the tactics employed by supporters of the BDS movement create new cause for concern, from the politicization of curricula and academic associations to efforts to silence Israeli speakers to overtly anti-Semitic behavior on campus. In a new essay, ACTA renews its call for the protection of […]
Most Americans would agree that academic freedom is a sacred right of the academy and crucial to the American experiment in democracy. But what is it really? That’s the question raised by the Associated Press’s July 16 release of emails between Mitch Daniels, when he was the governor of Indiana, and his staff concerning Howard […]
Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, generally does not see eye to eye with critics who say college campuses are hotbeds of political correctness and liberal indoctrination. This month, when he debated Peter Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars at the NAS annual conference in Washington, over the […]
Sigal Ben-Porath’s Inside Higher Ed article, Against Endorsing the Chicago Principles, puts the urgent need for uncompromised freedom of expression on a slippery slope. While properly observing that espousing even a clear statement of commitment is insufficient, Ben-Porath rejects the idea of its absolute necessity and thereby risks entirely derailing mainstream efforts to protect free speech […]
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