Academic Freedom Alliance Panel Discussion

Learn about the AFA and bring your questions

The Academic Freedom Alliance is a new, cross-ideological faculty group founded to defend professors whose academic freedom and free rights are under threat. The AFA will host a panel discussion on the afternoon of Thursday, March 11. The panel will feature Jeannie Suk Gersen of Harvard Law School, Ilana Redstone of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Lucas Morel of Washington and Lee University, and me. We will be taking questions from the audience. If you are curious about the organization and what it does, please join us. You can register for the event here.

Comments

[DaivdBehar]

Here is a good first task. Mandamus the IRS Non-Profit Office to cancel the tax exemption of any agency engaging in the very slightest viewpoint discrimination.

The exemption is to support education. Education requires presenting all sides of a subject. Presenting one side is indoctrination. It should not get tax payer support.

[Jimmy the Dane]

The author has yet to explain why another splinter group? Do we need some more letterhead to write "strongly worded" messages to those who seek to deny these rights? Or another venue for the usual talking heads to hang their hat for a panel discussion?

We have now had a generation of groups like this "defending" academic freedom and associated rights. What have they produced? Little. Time to rethink the game plan. Or maybe not if the goal is to just bilk some more dollars out of the usual right wing groups that donate to these cause...

[Commenter_XY]

Well, let's see the list of professors they are defending. Oh, there aren't any yet? Maybe Professor Whittington can get some ideas over at Legal Insurrection.

[Cal Cetín]

William F. Buckley, back before he was respectable, called academic freedom a superstition. Buckley thought that if only the trustees stepped in to correct the liberalism of the administration and the professors, something could be done.

Today, the trustees are probably busy having the employees at their banks and so on attending seminars on critical race theory.

(Disclaimer: This might be wrong - maybe there's a silent majority of conservative trustees just waiting to be told what's going on in their institutions so they can rush in and stop it.)

[Cal Cetín]

"Thank God, it's the trustees! You've got to stop what's going on at the university...wait, what are you doing?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEStsLJZhzo

[Jordan Brown]

So, to be a bit contrarian...

Remind me: who are the employers here, and who are the employees? Don't employers conventionally hire employees to do a specific job, in a way specified by the employer?

[Dr. Ed 2]

That is part of the problem -- EVERYONE is running the academy and NO ONE is actually working in it.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

" a new, cross-ideological faculty group "

That panel's composition evokes the reassuring words of Mrs. Bob, who responded to an inquiry from Elwood about the types of music offered at Bob's: 'oh, we got both kinds -- we got country and western.'

[DaivdBehar]

The other side is doing case and PC, cancel culture, and total lawfare intimidation to take out our American Way of Life, and to make us Venezuela. No response in kind yet.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

A group dominated by movement conservatives is likely to be eager to defend any bigot experiencing consequences for gratuitous use of a vile racial slur, mad_kalak.

This new organization might even take time away from promoting race-targeting voter suppression to do it. It needs to establish clinger street cred.

[DaivdBehar]

The rich owners seems pretty left wing already. They should hunt their own food, and jettison the rich overlords.

[Nige]

Such high principles, but it always comes down to crying up a storm about Dr Suess or arguing the real bigots are people who hate Nazis while doing the real work of engaging in massive voter supression.

[Nige]

What do any of those people have to do with academic freedom, though? Awful, awful people.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Bricks & molotovs are illegal -- and the problem is that the police are not enforcing those laws. Litigation on *that* might actually be effective.

As an aside, Milo announced today that he is no longer gay.
And if there were true academic freedom both Shapiro (Harvard) and Coulter (Yale) would be law professors somewhere.

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

I'm starting to think Dr. Seuss wasn't a real doctor. Probably just a PhD.