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A new report from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education finds that 74.2 percent of American colleges and universities, and 77 percent of public higher ed institutions, “maintain policies that clearly restrict speech that, outside the borders of campus, is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
The 28-page report can be found online here.
Edit: As Ashley notes in comments, and as I should have mentioned up front, FAIR is a right-leaning organization. I posted about their report in the spirit of “here’s something to look at” rather than as an endorsement of them as an organization, or even of their report. See my comment below for a little more detail, and look for a longer update at the end of the week.
The regents of Iowa’s three public universities have approved new policies for the investigation of campus sexual misconduct in the wake of a bungled response to a sexual assault complaint at the University of Iowa last fall.
In September of this year, an independent investigation found that administrators had mishandled an incident in which a student claimed that two football players raped her in a dorm room. According to the report, the university failed to provide complete and coherent information to the student throughout the complaint and investigation process and acted ineffectually in responding to her reports of harassment on campus after she filed the complaint.
In the past six months two UI faculty members have committed suicide while under investigation for sexual misconduct. In August, a political science professor shot himself while facing criminal prosecution for soliciting sexual favors from four students in exchange for grades, and in November a music professor asphyxiated himself after a former student sued him for sexual harassment.
Back in the spring, Arkansas law professor Richard Peltz brought a defamation lawsuit against two law students who had circulated a letter accusing him of racism in the classroom. At the time, the students’ lawyer argued that a charge of racist behavior, “in the context of public discourse at a law school,” was not grounds for legal action.
Peltz requested and received an investigation of his actions by administrators, and in October the school’s interim dean gave Peltz a letter stating that his investigation had revealed “no evidence that you are or have been a racist … during your employment at the law school.”
Saying that he brought the lawsuit to force the university to take a stand on his behavior, Peltz then dropped the suit and circulated a nine-page memo responding to the charges that had been made against him.
Jan Kemp, an English professor at the University of Georgia who exposed exploitation of student athletes in the 1980s, leading to reforms in NCAA eligibility policies, has died of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Kemp was fired by UGA in the early 1980s for refusing to inflate the grades of varsity athletes who were in some cases functionally illiterate. When she sued the university for wrongful dismissal, the university’s academic policies were themselves put on trial.
In one of the most damning pieces of evidence, an audiotape was introduced on which the head of remedial studies at UGA could be heard telling fellow professors that student athletes were “a kind of raw material in the production of some goods to be sold as whatever product, and they get nothing in return.”
Kemp was reinstated as a result of that trial, and awarded more than one million dollars in damages. The verdict led to the resignation of the university’s president, and to new academic standards for athletes at UGA and in the NCAA as a whole.
So the political world is buzzing right now about a photo of Obama’s chief speechwriter, the 27-year-old Jon Favreau.
In the photo, Favreau and another man are seen with a life-size cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton. Favreau is leaning in toward Clinton and smiling for the camera, like you would if you were getting your photo taken with a celebrity, but with one big difference — he’s groping the cutout’s “breast” with one hand. The other guy is kissing Clinton on the cheek and tipping a beer bottle up to her mouth.
It appears that the photo, which surfaced on Facebook not long ago, probably isn’t going to derail Favreau’s career. He has reportedly called Clinton to apologize, and Clinton’s people have put out a light-hearted statement on the incident. But the sexism and disrespect for Clinton evidenced in the photo have a lot of people fuming.
I mention all this here at studentactivism.net not because of any campus angle to this story, but because the photo reminds me powerfully of another photo — one taken more than a hundred years ago.
studentactivism.net 
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