The Fight for Academic Freedom in the UK
How the battle for the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act was fought, won, and nearly lost again.
Abhishek Saha
· 34 min read
Higher Education
A collection of 52 posts
An Unsettling Approach to Academic Freedom
The American Association of University Professors once defended heterodox thinkers. It now supports mandatory DEI statements and calls rival organisations right-wing stooges.
Andy Lamey
· 28 min read
Universities Are Worth Saving
Those seeking to address the crisis on America’s campuses should resist the tendency toward nihilism—the temptation to conclude that we need to just (metaphorically) burn it all down. q
Jonathan Rauch
· 14 min read
Podcast #270: ‘The Politics of the Academy Have Been Defeated’
Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with Yale English professor-turned-essayist William Deresiewicz, who argues that Americans—many Democrats included—are fed up with campus-style progressive radicalism.
Quillette, William Deresiewicz
· 9 min read
The Decline and Fall of Katherine Franke
Anti-Zionist falsehoods, malicious absurdities, and self-serving martyrdom at Columbia.
Cary Nelson, Joe Lockard
· 12 min read
Agitprop at the AHA
If the American Historical Association formally adopts a resolution accusing Israel of “scholasticide,” it could destroy the organisation’s reputation for serious scholarship.
Jeffrey Herf
· 15 min read
How Trump Can Lead Higher-Education Reform
Universities should operate for the benefit of students and society-at-large—not the well-paid administrators and senior academics who serve as their gatekeepers.
James Miller
· 4 min read
Identity and Conflicts of Interest
It is always the lecturer’s responsibility to ensure that students know that they can speak freely.
Holly Lawford-Smith
· 10 min read
Lessons from a Teachers-College Battle Over Free Speech and ‘Decolonization’
University of Western Ontario instructors spent months denouncing an outspoken education student who’d asked awkward questions about Indigenous reconciliation—until a UWO tribunal concluded they’d violated her rights.
Jonathan Kay
· 24 min read
Trump and the Academic Cocoon
A New York Times op-ed by a Yale historian tries to see universities from the vantage point of an outsider. Instead, it unwittingly illustrates why universities will not self-correct without external intervention.
Heather Mac Donald
· 12 min read
Reverse Sexism in Australian Research
Grant applications should be assessed on their scientific merits—not on the sex or political leanings of the applicant.
Andrew Glover
· 6 min read
The Amy Wax Affair
A tenured scholar has paid a high price for bluntly expressing uncomfortable truths.
Charles Murray
· 7 min read
Podcast #251: Tracing the Rise of Radicalised Anti-Zionism on American Campuses
Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with author Paul Berman about the lingering influence of ‘Black Power’ advocate Stokely Carmichael, who once infamously claimed that ‘the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.’
Jonathan Kay
· 29 min read
A Stupid Cartoon and the University Ideology
Frantz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael, and the roots of the uproar over Zionism.
Paul Berman
· 41 min read
Podcast #249: The (Other) Scandal at Oberlin College
Jonathan Kay speaks with Roya Hakakian about the rise and fall of Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, a former Iranian official who’d presented himself to Oberlin as an agent of peace and ‘forgiveness.’
Quillette
· 23 min read