More Information about the Academic Freedom Alliance

On March 8, the Academic Freedom Alliance launched publicly. I have the pleasure of chairing the organization, a nonprofit aimed at advancing and defending academic freedom and professorial free speech at American universities. The founding members of the AFA are a diverse group that runs across the ideological spectrum, and the AFA is committed to defending professorial speech rights regardless of the content of the speech or the ideas being expressed. Professors can quite appropriately be criticized for bad ideas or poor judgment, but when they are acting within their established contractual or constitutional rights they cannot be sanctioned by their employers for their speech.

Over the past several days, I have elaborated on the commitments of the group and the principles of the AFA. You can see more at an interview with the alumni group, Princetonians for Free Speech, and with the AAUP's Academe Blog. I wrote about the group at National Review Online. My conversation about academic freedom and campus free speech with the Shaping Opinion podcast will drop on Monday. We are grateful for coverage of the launch by such outlets as the FIRE, Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, the New York Post, Inside Higher Ed, Forbes, and Voice of America.

Comments

[DaivdBehar]

Merge with FIRE and become its vicious lawfare arm.

[DaivdBehar]

Mandamus the IRS Non-Profit Office to cancel the tax exemption of any agency that has engaged in the very slightest viewpoint discrimation. All law schools should lose their tax exemptions.

The purpose is to give governemtn support and subsidy to education. In education, all sides of a subject are presented. Excluding any viewpoint is indoctrination. It should not continue to be subsidized by government.

In answer to a question of a blogger, atheism should be presented in a religion course, KKK ideolgy in Black Studies, Nazi thinking in Holocaust Studies, the Ptolemaic system of solar and planetary movement around the earth in astronomy class. These classes will enrich these courses. Of course, a review of the failure of every self stated goal of every law subject, and how much the lawyer profession sucks, should be presented the first day of every law school course.

[Jimmy the Dane]

Still no explanation on why this group is necessary when there is a need for this group when we are already a wash with "academic freedom" focused organizations...

[DaivdBehar]

One big outfit with a direct action branch should be more effective than many small ones. Terrorize the enemy with ruinous litigation, and all around attacks, on their funding, their zoning violations, their tax exemptions, their grants, their subsidies, their legislative support. Picket their homes with horns and loudspeakers. Do the the same to their billionaire sponsors and traitors to this country. Disrupt their Commie meetings, push them around outside. Because all PC is case, do the same to unAmerican judges. To deter.

[Nige]

Not a big 'free speech' guy, then.

[DaivdBehar]

Say whatever you want. Just do not take my tax money to subsidize your quack indoctrination.

[Nige]

I'll damn well do whatever I can get my elected officials to do for me and if you don't like it go lick a Trump portrait.

[DaivdBehar]

Explain what is upsetting you, again.

[Nige]

'the AFA is committed to defending professorial speech rights regardless of the content of the speech or the ideas being expressed.'

So, theoretically, you'll defend, eg, Nazi speech, Stalinist speech, racist speech, sexist speech, homophobic speech, trasphobic speech, lying speech, misinformation speech, disinformation speech, defamatory speech, threatening speech, abusive speech, harassing speech and bullying speech. Theoretically, you would also be obliged to defend the speech of whoever all the aforementioned speech is directed. I wonder how that will work out.

[Nige]

If you type 'speech' out often enough it starts to look like the name of an annoying alien sidekick in an '80s cartoon.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

"The founding members of the AFA are a diverse group that runs across the ideological spectrum"

So far, this group seems at home with National Review Online, with Princetonians For Free Speech, and at Bob's County Bunker, whose commitment to musical diversity includes playing 'both kinds of music . . . country and western.'

This group was conceived by conservatives and is funded by conservatives. When it takes on dogma-enforcing, science-suppressing, nonsense-teaching conservative campuses rather than attacking diversity policies at mainstream schools, I will begin to consider whether this organization might be more than just another partisan soldier for the clingerverse.

[bevis the lumberjack]

Better to just keep it simple and burn books like you. Right, Art?

Fucking fascist.

[DaivdBehar]

Bevis. Just say, Artie is a lawyer.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

I did not refer to burning books. I mentioned faux diversity and the predictable course of a right-wing organization.

Other than that, great comment, you obsolete, bigoted clinger.

[bevis the lumberjack]

You’ve supported the book burning side on other posts, fascist. And frankly there isn’t a single one of our freedoms that you support us having. Your dream is to jam your preferred thinking and behavior down our throats. Because you’re a fascist.

And your clinger schtick is stupid as shit. What am I supposed to be clinging to? Guns? I’ve never owned one. Great read there, Sherlock.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

My approach to book-burning, in the context relevant to this right-wing blog, has been stated repeatedly:

Bigots have rights, too.

[DaivdBehar]

Artie. Don't you think the lawyer profession should be cancelled? Zero tolerance for PC, all of which is fraud and case.

[lhfry]

National Association of Scholars? I go with the “one big group” idea above.