On December 5th a US Congressional committee grilled three prominent university presidents—Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania (who has since resigned), Sally Kornbluth of MIT, and Claudine Gay of Harvard in a hearing on “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.” Jan Haaken talks with Jennifer Ruth about the hearing and the political dynamics driving the interrogation of these administrators. Ruth is a professor of Film Studies and associate dean of the College of the Arts at Portland State University and has published extensively on campus politics, free speech issues, and academic freedom. She is co-author of It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (2022) and co-editor of the forthcoming The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. She and co-author Michael Bérubé published a commentary on the hearing in The New Republic, December 18, 2023.
Image: (fair use) Cover of Jennifer Ruth's It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) Co-authored with Michael Bérubé
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