New Academic Freedom Podcast on the Columbia Situation

A conversation with David Cole

A new episode of the Academic Freedom Podcast has been released. The podcast is sponsored by the Academic Freedom Alliance and the Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech at Yale Law School.

This episode features a conversation with David Cole about the current situation at Columbia University. David Cole is the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University Law Center. He is also the former National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He is also a principal author of the recently released "Statement from Constitutional Law Scholars on Columbia."

The Trump administration is currently withholding some $400 million dollars in federal grants from Columbia University until it complies with a list of demands that includes everything from reforming undergraduate and graduate admissions to putting an academic department into receivership.

On the podcast, we discuss the legalities of the administration's actions and its implications for higher education broadly and for academic freedom in the United States.

Comments

[Stephen Lathrop]

So I just hit, "Submit," on the open thread, and the whole thread instantly disappeared. Probably not me, I'm guessing. The famous Northeast blackout started the instant I switched on a light in my dorm room, which turned out to be coincidence . . . I think.

[thesafesurfer]

Higher education has only itself to blame for this situation. At the very beginning of the podcast a professor talked about the lack of due process in the administration's demands. This immediately evoked thoughts about the suspension of due process directed by the Obama and Biden administrations for individuals accused of sexual assault or harassment. I tried to find the protest podcast for that abuse of due process by this same scholars but to no avail. Listening to these individuals squirm over the possibility that they will no longer get to gorge themselves without check or audit at the trough of taxpayer funds was a bonus. These pompous cowards referred to violent anti-Semites as "pro-Palestinian youths." The legalese justifications for vile anti-Semitism was repulsive.

Buckley was right. I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand constitutional scholars.

Higher education has only itself to blame.

[Sarcastr0]

Few things are more corrosive in politics than the conviction that you have been wronged so much that you're justified in breaking all the rules to get even.

[y81]

What a farce that there should be a center for academic freedom and free speech at Yale, where the law school dean, Dean Gerken, told a student that membership in the Federalist Society was "triggering." Is Prof. Whittington truly so obtuse as to be unaware what a fatuous hypocrite he seems?

[Ed Grinberg]

https://reason.com/volokh/2023/12/13/university-presidential-testimony-fallout/?comments=true#comment-10356914

[AtR]

I think that a reasonable test for any of this discussion is whether you would feel the same way about the KKK acting similarly on campus.

[Champion]

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