Northwestern University

Monday

Charles Lipson

Trump takes a hammer to the universities

President Trump has already dropped the first hammer on Harvard. He’s ready to drop the whole tool chest on a whole slew of universities – and it won’t be pretty. Outraged Democrats will call the punishing sanctions authoritarian, even fascist, and well beyond the authority of a constitutional officer. Republicans will back the president, saying universities had plenty of chances to correct their serious problems and did nothing.  Some threatened sanctions are readily defensible, such as demanding better protection for Jewish students and eliminating discrimination in admissions, hiring and promotion. Some are not, such as demanding intrusive federal oversight of course content and departmental hiring. All Trump’s actions will be challenged in court.

British trump universities

Thursday

Matthew Foldi

Funding frozen for conservative student groups at Northwestern after James Lindsay event

Northwestern University’s student government is retaliating against its College Republicans and Young America’s Foundation chapter for hosting James Lindsay, a conservative speaker, by freezing their funding and demanding the university open an investigation that may or may not already be ongoing. In an emergency meeting, the school’s Associated Student Government, or ASG, scrambled to pass a resolution that condemned the two groups for their event flyers, which mimicked the design of one of the guest speaker’s books, by adding a skull and crossbones cartoon onto sunglasses with the Pride flag.

northwestern

Monday

Neetu Arnold

How Qatari money is undermining free speech at universities

“It is often said that history will judge us not only for what we said and did in times of strife, but also for our silence.” So wrote Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism dean Charles Whitaker in 2018. The statement was released following a heated exchange between former president Donald Trump and CNN reporter Jim Acosta, which resulted in the White House revoking Acosta’s press pass. Whitaker believed it was important for an “institution as prominent as Medill” to defend the journalism profession against such an “attack.” Four years later, Northwestern has failed to practice what it preaches: it fell silent when Qatari security officials threatened to smash a Danish journalist’s camera during a live TV report on the FIFA World Cup.

Monday

Amber Duke

Him too: is Alec Klein a predator — or a victim?

Alec Klein has spent a lot of time on the telephone to people in jail. As a reporter, Klein investigated wrongful convictions and excessive sentences. He freed many unfairly incarcerated people. Then the tables turned. Today, Klein is a social and professional pariah. For more than two years, he has been effectively confined to his home after being accused of sexual harassment while working as the director of the Medill Justice Project at Northwestern University. Is he yet another victim of injustice? Klein took over the Medill Justice Project in 2011 after its founder, David Protess, was accused of fabricating evidence and manipulating a man into falsely confessing to a murder he didn’t commit.

alec klein

Tuesday

Cole Carnick

A journalism lesson from Northwestern

Student journalists at Northwestern University apologized for doing journalism on Sunday.In response to complaints by student activists over their coverage of Jeff Sessions’s recent visit to campus, the staff of the Daily Northwestern apologized for causing ‘harm’ to their fellow students in a recent editorial. Among their supposed transgressions, the reporters posted pictures of protesters to social media, which was ‘retraumatizing and invasive’, and committed an ‘invasion of privacy’ by contacting students for interviews.Why apologize for standard journalistic procedures? The editors offered this reasoning: ‘We feel that covering traumatic events requires a different response than many other stories.

Northwestern University