By Harvey Silverglate

As engines of creativity and innovation, colleges are always pushing the envelope on scholarship. While this is usually good – since it broadens our culture’s collective knowledge – occasionally you see some really idiotic proposals and research agendas coming out of the American academy. And each time you think you’ve seen the last truly dumb idea – at least for a while – emerge from a college campus, along comes an even dumber one to challenge your grasp on reality.

By Harvey Silverglate

As engines of creativity and innovation, colleges are always pushing the envelope on scholarship. While this is usually good – since it broadens our culture’s collective knowledge – occasionally you see some really idiotic proposals and research agendas coming out of the American academy. And each time you think you’ve seen the last truly dumb idea – at least for a while – emerge from a college campus, along comes an even dumber one to challenge your grasp on reality.

The Waltham-based university named after the late and great Supreme Court Justice, Louis D. Brandeis, champion of free speech and free thought, has just achieved the dubious distinction of winning one of the “muzzle awards” given out annually by the highly respected Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, located in Charlottesville, Virginia.

By James F. Tierney

In a story we missed when it first broke a month ago, a federal appellate court upheld a Texas school's decision to suspend the high school sophomore for writing a violent fictional short story that school administrators interpreted to be a "terroristic threat." According to the Student Press Law Center, the Fifth Circuit decision "relied heavily on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's opinion" in the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case that came down this summer -- Morse v.

By Harvey Silverglate

For quite some time, I’ve been griping about what I call “the corporatization of the American university” – the trend in which our colleges and universities have prioritized their role as businesses over their role as educational institutions. This transition has led to all manner and kind of mischief, including an administrative culture that is willing to sacrifice such basic values as academic freedom and rational processes in order that there be “no trouble on the watch” of the current president, whoever he or she might be.

By James F. Tierney

Two weeks ago, Harvey Silverglate blogged about a federal Magistrate Judge, Wayne Brazil, who overturned a “civility code” at San Francisco State University on the grounds that it targeted speech and expression that falls under the protection of the First Amendment. (The case was brought by the officers of SFSU's College Republicans, who were investigated under the civility code when students complained they had insulted Muslims by stepping on the Hamas and Hezbollah flags -- which contain the word “Allah” in Arabic script -- during an anti-terrorism rally.

By Harvey Silverglate

H. L. Mencken, late in life, allowed himself to be interviewed by a young reporter from his hometown newspaper. The interviewer asked the grand old curmudgeon, "why, if you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, do you continue to live here?" Mencken answered the query with another question: “Why do people visit zoos?” Well, living right smack in the middle of the zoo that Harvard has become in its dotage, I now understand Mencken’s reasoning perfectly.

One of the craftiest semantic tricks adopted by campus censors since the mid-1980s used to suppress unpopular viewpoints and supposedly offensive speech on campus has been the “civility code,” a close relative of the “harassment code.” The latter has received more attention by commentators as well as courts

By Harvey Silverglate

The act of censorship is usually seen as a direct affront to the First Amendment, buts it’s not always that clear and simple. The reason, of course, is that the amendment has several clauses, and at times some of them are in tension with one another, if not in seeming conflict.

Consider today’s curious report in The Boston Globe that the pastor of St.