Host a Scholar

Arizona legislators are considering one bill that would punish college instructors whose speech or actions would violate broadcast obscenity standards and another bill designed to protect conservative faculty members from discrimination in getting hired or tenured.

How scientists broke through the paywall and made their articles available to (almost) everyone.

Dickinson State University has backed away from plans to start a Confucius Institute on its campus.

Students protested at several universities in Egypt yesterday, and there were reports that an American student had been arrested for allegedly bribing people to join a strike.

Last week, faculty leaders at two universities held emergency meetings to object to administration proposals that professors said were dangerous to their rights.

An academic has resigned as dean of the school of communications at Hong Kong’s Baptist University after the institution became embroiled in political controversy over a public opinion survey he conducted in January.

United University Professions, the union that represents faculty members and other academic employees at 29 campuses of the State University of New York, is dropping its affiliation with the American Association of University Professors.

Applications are now open for a new program offered by the Fuqua School of Business in the United Arab Emirates.

In Virginia, the attorney general, skeptical of global warming, tried to use his subpoena powers to build a fraud case against a climatology professor.

“I heard people talk about places like Harvard, Brown, and universities in Europe,” said Tararith Kho of his childhood. “But I come from a poor place close to the Thai border. I never dreamed I would come here.” He is now a fellow in Harvard’s Scholars at Risk program.

The running of Scotland’s universities will become politicised under SNP proposals to introduce elections and quotas for key officials, experts have warned.

WHO would have predicted? Five years ago Australia was the only OECD country experiencing a declining share of public funding for higher education in gross domestic product: a fall of 4 per cent compared with an average rise of 49 per cent in the decade to 2007.

Just days before Joel Bloom was appointed last month as president of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, three faculty members on the search committee quit, saying that the process was moving too quickly.

The New Faculty Majority (NFM) summit, "Reclaiming Academic Democracy: Facing the Consequences of Contingent Employment in Higher Education," held on Saturday, 28 January, at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, DC, was full of bitter ironies.

Scientists should agree not to publish experiments into increasing the virulence of potentially dangerous microbes such as the bird flu virus until wider society can agree on “the balance that must be struck between academic freedom and protecting the greater good of humankind from potential danger”.

A federal appeals court on Friday revived the lawsuit of a former graduate student in psychology who was kicked out of a master's program at Eastern Michigan University for refusing to counsel gay clients in a way that affirmed their identities.

Opinion surveys, a common source of research information in universities around the world, have become a political minefield for Hong Kong’s universities, with recent surveys landing academics in trouble with Beijing.

Belarus’ bid to join the European Higher Education Area should be turned down, according to the high-level group following up the Bologna process.

There’s a new battle brewing in America’s classrooms, and while it doesn’t have the religious implications of the evolution vs. creationism debate, it has prompted several state legislatures and local school boards to get involved.

Contemporary Ukraine is a testing ground, not just for educational reforms but also for a fierce struggle being waged against Soviet and Russian colonial heritage and for the right to be part of a united Europe and in particular to be part of the European higher education area.

A national summit on adjunct faculty members held here Saturday produced both heated denunciations of the forces blamed for adjuncts' exploitation and loose consensus on a proposed campaign to improve their working conditions.

Academics are cautiously optimistic on anniversary of revolution.

ZHANDETAN, China — There are many marvels at the end of the punishing dirt road that skirts the edge of this stark white glacier high on the Tibetan plateau: thousands of fluttering crimson prayer flags, planted on the slopes by the religious faithful; wild goats scrambling across impossibly steep cliffs; and Buddhist monks meditating as they have for centuries in a place where newcomers find themselves gasping for air.

My first impression of the country was a threat. No, not the customs form that reads, “Warning: death for drug traffickers under Singapore law.” Within two hours of landing, a security guard threatened me with arrest. My crime? Standing outside the airport subway terminal at 3 a.m., reading the schedule. Welcome to Singapore.

The United States has arrested and charged an Iranian semiconductor scientist with violating U.S. export laws by buying high-tech U.S. lab equipment, a development likely to further worsen Iranian-U.S. tensions.

The University of Edinburgh is ending a research deal with Bahrain’s Ministry of Education after human-rights and student groups objected to the plan.

Scholars say moves against critics and their families echo communist repression.

The Sunday Times over the weekend had a feature about six children suffering from Gender Identity Disorder who are being given drugs to delay the onset of puberty, giving them more time to decide whether they wish to change sex later in life.

A legal dispute in Boston pits researchers' academic freedom against a police quest to solve one of the most notorious killings of Ireland's sectarian "Troubles."

Graduate students enroll in the department of social and cultural anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies to examine and fight oppression in postcolonial nations, not to encounter it at home.

When soldiers and protesters clashed in downtown Cairo in late December, the army's crackdown left at least 16 dead and hundreds injured. Another victim of the violence was the oldest scientific institute in Egypt, which was largely destroyed in a fire, along with much of its precious library, writes Ursula Lindsey for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Malaysia will not attain its goal of being the “Harvard of the East” if scholars continue to chase after positions instead of knowledge, Dr Abdul Aziz Bari said today.

Scholars at Risk welcomes the release of two individuals: Vietnamese professor of mathematics, Pham Minh Hoang, who was released from prison on January 13, 2012; and Yassin Ziadeh, the brother of Syrian scholar and activist Radwan Ziadeh. Yassin was released from detention on November 5, 2011. More information on each follows below.

On Wednesday thousands of scholars joined millions of people around the world in online protest of two proposed laws, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). SOPA and PIPA would, in the view of many observers, authorize wide-ranging online censorship in the guise of stopping copyright infringement. So far, the protest appears to have been a success: Congressional support for the proposed laws is crumbling.

VIENNA (Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Friday it did not know an Iranian scientist who was killed last week, rejecting Tehran's suggestions it may have been partly to blame for his death by leaking information about him.

Scholars at Risk welcomes the release of two individuals: Vietnamese professor of mathematics, Pham Minh Hoang, who was released from prison on January 13, 2012; and Yassin Ziadeh, the brother of Syrian scholar and activist Radwan Ziadeh. Yassin was released from detention on November 5, 2011. More information on each follows below.

A group of academics, social activists, writers and students have launched a new campaign to push for amendments to Thailand’s draconian lèse majesté legislation in the hope of ending abuses of the law that they say violates the principle of free speech.

Kenya has published new rules and put more than 200 institutions on notice in a crackdown that will see 21 managers facing criminal charges for operating illegal colleges, with 63 having been closed over the past year.

Four associations that represent college leaders are urging the Colorado Supreme Court to declare that the University of Colorado’s Board of Regents is a quasi-judicial body and thus immune from a lawsuit in which Ward Churchill, the controversial ethnic-studies scholar, challenges his dismissal from the university system’s Boulder campus.

Everyone agrees a recently canceled Iowa State University class on the role of the Bible in business is a First Amendment issue. As to what that issue is, opinions vary.

Robert C. Post’s Democracy, Expertise, Academic Freedom, published by Yale University Press, is a succinct and tightly argued book, and its subtitle, “A First Amendment Jurisprudence for the Modern State,” clearly signals a calm sobriety that can't be taken for granted. It covers topics that typically provoke controversy more often than thought.

The American Association of University Professors last week sent a letter to the City University of New York chancellor and board chair, citing concerns about the “Pathways to Degree Completion Initiative,” a move by CUNY to enable smoother transfer for its community college students to CUNY's four-year institutions.

Chinese dissident writer Yu Jie, who fled to the United States this month, says he was tortured and harassed in 2010 even as the Nobel Peace Prize was being awarded to his best friend, Liu Xiaobo.

The Natural History Museum is today accused by a coalition of prominent academics and cultural figures of helping to break international law by leading a research project which involves an Israeli cosmetics company based in an “illegal” settlement in the occupied West Bank.

Weekday mornings at 5, when the lights on distant hillsides across the border still twinkle in the blackness, Martha, a high school senior, begins her arduous three-hour commute to school. She groggily unlocks the security gate guarded by the family Doberman and waits in the glare of the Pemex filling station for the bus to the border. Her fellow passengers, grown men with their arms folded, jostle her in their sleep.

On 5 January Tunisian Salafists, ultra-conservative Muslims, ended a weeks-long protest at Manouba University's faculty of letters, arts and humanities that had forced the institution to close. It is expected to reopen next week. The case has highlighted the implications of democratic changes in the Arab world for academic freedom in universities.

Lecturers in Malawi have resolved to return to work to end nearly a year of academic freedom protests during a long-running impasse with the government. But with tensions and mistrust persisting, lecturers have been firm about setting out the conditions under which they will resume classes.

When soldiers and protesters clashed in downtown Cairo in late December, the army's crackdown left at least 16 dead and hundreds injured. Another victim of the violence was the oldest scientific institute in Egypt, which was largely destroyed in a fire, along with much of its precious library.

Religiously affiliated colleges in Texas are subject to scrutiny by the state's higher-education oversight board, but only when it receives a complaint about a secular matter, the state's attorney general has concluded.