Since late April I have been following the case of Professor William I. Robinson at UCSB, who became the subject of an official university investigation after sending the students in his Sociology of Globalization class an e-mail comparing the Nazi treatment of Jews with Israel's actions towards Palestinians. The...

Back in May, I reported on the case of William I. Robinson, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara who is being investigated for writing his students an e-mail comparing the Nazi treatment of Jews with Israel's actions towards Palestinians. At that point the investigation seemed somewhat...

Back in March, I uncovered that members of the Oklahoma state legislature had launched an investigation of a March 6 speech at the University of Oklahoma by noted evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. The investigation was preceded by an attempt by another Oklahoma legislator to pass two bills condemning...

Academic freedom is once again in the news, this time because a professor at UC Santa Barbara is being investigated for sending his students an anti-Israel e-mail blast.

At the middle of the controversy is sociology professor William I. Robinson, a self-proclaimed "scholar-activist," who sent an...

Two weeks ago, I was working as a staff member at a Buddhist retreat in New York City. On the way to lunch, I was discussing with our instructor for the weekend the passions and anger often ignited when fighting for free speech on campus. He was surprised to...

There are a whole host of little lessons one learns when working in First Amendment law: What is vulgar to one person might be poetic to another, occasional offense is a small price to pay for a pluralistic democracy, without a free press there can be no meaningful democratic process,...

The week is not quite over, and it's already been a lousy one for free speech on America's campuses. Yesterday, angry students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst were caught on video stealing a conservative student newspaper, while a police officer stood by and not only watched, but excused the...

On Friday, I posted about the revelation that members of the Oklahoma Legislature are investigating the March 6th speech given by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins at the University of Oklahoma. This investigation came after a state representative tried to pass two resolutions condemning Dawkins and evolution. This morning...

Well, it's official: Oklahoma's state legislature is investigating the University of Oklahoma for hosting a speech by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

As I noted in a post over the weekend at Dawkins' website, the legislature first considered two resolutions condemning both Dawkins and the theory of evolution...

I spent most of the summer of 1996 on my brother's couch in Long Beach, California. I had just graduated from college and was discovering that it's extremely difficult to find a job in the greater L.A. area without a car. I remember watching the evening news one night: four...

Readers of my previous two posts on Kara Spencer's "spamming" ordeal at Michigan State University (MSU) will be happy to know that MSU has finally come to its senses and dropped the ridiculous charges against the student government leader. This is a welcome change after MSU seemed...

I sometimes like to think nothing surprises me anymore with regard to censorship on campus, but it seems as though every couple of weeks I see something that proves me wrong. As I reported last week, Michigan State University charged student government leader Kara Spencer with "spamming" for sending...

Imagine you're an energetic leader of student government at a major state school. You've been in extensive discussion with students and professors about the administration's decision to cut short the semester. Students feel ripped off and professors feel that two fewer days of instruction would seriously impinge on their academic...

While Quinnipiac University Attacks the Student Press, University of Oklahoma Does the Right Thing

Earlier this month, I posted about the crazy trend on college campuses to ban political speech by students and faculty during this exciting election cycle.

Since the fall semester kicked off, colleges across the...

If you're a student at the University of Oklahoma and you enjoy The Huffington Post, beware: Your school has forbidden you from forwarding any of the fabulous political content you may find on this site.

Sounds crazy, but sadly it's true. Students at the University of Oklahoma have been...

It's September and the collegiate school year is back in full gear. That means I'm back to digging through claims by students and faculty across the country that their rights have been violated by overzealous campus administrators. Unfortunately, my experience as president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in...

For better or worse, Harvard University is enshrined in the popular imagination as our nation's premier liberal arts institution. While I blame Elle Woods, the fact is that every aspect of Harvard's institutional conduct is examined and imitated by the rest of the academy. Simply put, Harvard is a...

Most Americans probably think of state-mandated loyalty oaths as relics of a bygone era, evoking the dark days of the Red Scare and McCarthyism. You might be surprised, however, to find that these illiberal tools for rooting out commies are still around in the 21st century -- and that the...

I hate the abuse of the word literally. Somehow our society has co-opted the word to mean something like "very much so" as opposed to, you know, literally. Since I'm a nerd about this stuff, it's fun for me to use the word as it's meant to be used....

Check out Julian Sanchez's take on why students at Smith should not be proud they disrupted a campus speech by an anti-gay speaker.

In his post--which sports the excellent (and astute) title Surely Lucy Won't Yank the Football Away This Time!--Sanchez wisely points out that the...