Search for: "Keith E. Whittington"
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3 Aug 2023, 5:10 am
[State tries to bar Stanford researchers from testifying against it] An interesting new expert witness controversy has broken out; this time in California. You will recall the Florida fiasco recounted here and here and here. A group of parents are suing the state over the learning losses that that the state's pandemic response imposed on children. Plaintiff attorneys recruited expert witnesses from Stanford University to support their case. The California education department claims that the… [read post]
5 Jan 2023, 7:00 am
[In email to campus Hamline University president reemphasizes that academic freedom does not exist there] Hamline University is going through some things. After terminating an instructor of art history for showing a class artwork that offended some Muslim students, numerous scholars and advocacy groups have denounced the university's actions as a serious affront to academic freedom. FIRE has gone further an filed a complaint with an accreditation agency. Part of what made the case particularly… [read post]
29 Dec 2022, 12:20 pm
[It is not a workplace "disruption" that co-workers objected to a MAGA hat] Eugene beat me to the punch in posting about the new 9th Circuit case on a teacher wearing a MAGA hat to his school's cultural sensitivity training session, so I will be brief. You can read a longer excerpt from the case in his post below. I wanted to point out a specific feature of the case, which is how it treated the concept of workplace "disruption" within a Pickering balancing analysis of how… [read post]
29 Oct 2022, 8:46 am
[New article in symposium on the law and politics of impeachment now available] Missouri Law Review just released its new issue featuring a symposium on the law and politics of the impeachments of President Donald Trump. It includes an all-star cast of contributors, including Frank Bowman, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Sen. Dick Durbin, Michael Gerhardt, Gene Healy, Brian Kalt, Michael McConnell, Victoria Nourse, and me. My article in the symposium is focused on the first impeachment. From the abstract:… [read post]
19 Jan 2022, 1:02 pm
[Draft article on academic freedom now available] In November 2021, I was a commentator in response to the 26th Annual Frankel Lecture at the University of Houston Law Center. The keynote was delivered by Harvard Law School Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen on "Academic Freedom and Discrimination in a Polarizing Time." Responses were delivered by Berkeley Law School Professor Khiara M. Bridges and me. You can view a recording of the event here. My paper on "Academic Freedom and the Mission… [read post]
8 Dec 2021, 8:20 am
[Universities are better off if the faculty do not all think alike] As part of an issue dedicated to freedom of thought in the journal Social Philosophy and Policy, I published on article focusing on ideological diversity on the faculty at American universities. You can find the published version behind a paywall here, but I have now posted a draft version that is freely accessible. The paper takes up four questions. First, is it true that university faculty are not very ideologically diverse. It is… [read post]
25 Jul 2025, 5:33 am
[My new article on diversity statements in faculty hiring and the First Amendment] In 2024, I was honored to deliver the Roscoe Pound Lecture at the University of Nebraska College of Law. The article based on that lecture is now in print, and until the Nebraska Law Review updates its website with the contents of issue 4 of volume 103 you can find a PDF of the article here. The article is called "Diversity Statements, Academic Freedom, and the First Amendment." From the abstract: Diversity… [read post]
20 Mar 2025, 5:15 am
[A threat to academic freedom] Yesterday the Trump administration launched yet another massive financial blow at a university because it has done some things the administration does not like. This time the University of Pennsylvania's medical research is being decimated because the administration disagrees with the Penn athletic department's transgender policies. Today I have a piece out in The Dispatch focusing on the earlier actions regarding Columbia University. New reporting suggests… [read post]
10 Dec 2024, 7:24 am
The description of the new episode: The AFA's Keith Whittington interviews Cary Nelson, the Jubiliee [read post]
7 Dec 2023, 12:01 pm
[Only one option will preserve the central mission of the university] Yesterday's House hearings demonstrated the bind that university presidents are in as American college campuses are buffeted by protests relating to the events in Israel and Gaza. University leaders want to point to their free speech policies when students, donors, and politicians demand that they take action against antisemitic speech, but everyone knows that they have frequently cast aside any concern with free speech,… [read post]
1 Feb 2024, 4:57 am
[My new article on the First Amendment and controversial faculty speech] The new issue of the Case Western Reserve Law Review with a symposium on the First Amendment and classrooms has now arrived, and with it my article, "What Can Professors Say in Public? Extramural Speech and the First Amendment." From the abstract: Since the early twentieth century, academics have urged universities to recognize robust protections for the freedom of professors to speak in public on matters of… [read post]
15 Dec 2023, 10:49 am
[Now available for viewing on C-Span] On December 12, I participated in a timely panel discussion at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study on "Free Speech, Political Speech, and Hate Speech on Campus." The panel included Jeannie Suk Gersen, Nadine Strossen, and Erica Chenoweth, and was moderated by Tomiko Brown-Nagin. A recording of that event is now available for viewing on C-Span here. From the C-Span description. Scholars from Harvard, Princeton, and New York Law School discussed… [read post]
16 Oct 2023, 10:18 am
After spending more than two decades in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, I'm pleased to announce that I will joining the faculty of Yale Law School in the fall of 2024. At YLS, I also expect to be the faculty director of a new center focused on academic freedom and free speech issues. I've been extremely fortunate to have been at Princeton, and I leave with nothing but good feelings and best wishes for my students and colleagues there. It is time to take on some new… [read post]
11 Aug 2023, 7:28 am
[A new statement worth reading for those concerned with academia] A group of scholars interested in free inquiry and the future of higher education met in Princeton last spring and began a conversation about what principles ought to guide a well-functioning scholarly institution dedicated to the mission of the preservation and advancement of knowledge. With radical proposals for higher education reform very much in the air, especially on the political right, it was hoped that it would be helpful to… [read post]
6 Jul 2023, 1:04 pm
[Is "intramural" professorial speech protected by the First Amendment?] A panel of the Fourth Circuit handed down a 2-1 decision today in Porter v. Board of Trustees of North Carolina State University. The opinion can be found here. Porter is a tenured statistics professor in the college of education. He was unhappy with the direction of the higher ed program, with which he was affiliated. In particular, he thought the college and the program had gone woke and was promoting social justice… [read post]
31 Oct 2022, 9:24 am
[My new paper on the First Amendment, Pickering balancing, and extramural speech] For over a century, the American Association of University Professors has urged universities to recognize a robust freedom for professors to speak in public "as citizens" without fear of retaliation from their university employers even when such expression is controversial with either external or internal constituencies. That right is now widely recognized by American universities and incorporated into… [read post]
26 Sep 2022, 9:14 am
[To defend the Stop WOKE Act, Florida asks court to eliminate any academic freedom exception to government employee speech doctrine] This past summer Florida adopted House Bill 7, better known as the Stop WOKE Act. The legislation blocks academic instruction and workplace training that "espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels" belief in a variety of race-related ideas. It is one of a number of so-called anti-"Critical Race Theory" bills that have been advanced by… [read post]
26 Aug 2022, 7:35 am
[Diversity statements have become common in university admissions and hiring, and that's a problem] Earlier this week, the Academic Freedom Alliance released a new public statement. It called for an end to mandatory diversity statements in university admissions and hiring. In recent years, a growing number of colleges and universities have begun to require applicants for graduate school admission and for faculty jobs to write an essay explaining their commitment to diversity, equity and… [read post]
15 Aug 2022, 5:30 am
[A comprehensive catalog of every case in which the Court considered a constitutional challenge to an act of Congress] I have now posted to my personal website an updated and expanded version of the Judicial Review of Congress Database. You may find here the database itself, a description of the variables, a description of how the cases were identified and selected, and a text list of the cases invalidating a provision of an act of Congress in whole or in part. (A comparable list of cases upholding… [read post]
18 May 2022, 2:47 pm
[Fifth Circuit panel finds several constitutional problems with the Securities and Exchange Commission] In Jarkesy v. Securities and Exchange Commission, a divided three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit put a shot across the bow of the administrative state. In an opinion written by Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod, the court ruled against the SEC in a securities fraud enforcement case on several constitutional claims. The full opinion can be found here. Petitioners raise several constitutional challenges… [read post]
