CAMPUS

February 5th, 2009

The Upside of Down Markets

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that JuicyCampus, purveyor of smutty college gossip, has shut down, citing hard economic times.

Well, couldn’t have happened to worse guys. For those who haven’t had the displeasure, JuicyCampus was a site that allowed users to anonymously post gossip about their fellow college classmates – the sort of reputation-damaging stuff that would almost never fall on the right side of libel law outside the Internet.

Posted in Blog
By CJ Ciaramella

January 14th, 2009

Lest We Forget

The Chronicle of Higher Education reminds us why civil liberties and academic freedom are important:

Saudi authorities have released Matrouk al-Faleh, a political scientist and one of Saudi Arabia’s leading human-rights activists, after holding him without charge for nearly eight months, CNN reports.

It remains unclear why Mr. al-Faleh was released or even why the Saudi secret police arrested him in the first place, on May 19 in his office at Riyadh’s King Saud University.

The arrest came shortly after Mr. al-Faleh publicly criticized the harsh and overcrowded conditions that two of his clients were facing in prison. Both men were fellow human-rights activists who had been found guilty of “incitement to protest” after supporting a demonstration outside the prison.

Posted in Blog
By CJ Ciaramella

December 15th, 2008

FIRE Report Shows Widespread Restriction of Free Speech on Campuses

Today FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) released a report on the state of free speech in American universities, finding that 74 percent of the 364 campuses studied significantly limit speech on campus. (Full PDF of the report here, summary of findings here.)

Posted in Blog
By CJ Ciaramella