How Do You Get Rid Of A Tenured Professor? Play The Race Card.

Brandeis, a private university with about 3,200 students, is named after former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, a passionate defender of free speech rights.

That's the irony of this story.

Politics professor Donald Hindley, who has taught at the Waltham, Massachussetts school for 47 years, had a monitor placed in his classroom and was asked to undergo sensitivity training after he told students in his Latin American politics class last semester that Mexican migrants are sometimes referred to pejoratively as "wetbacks."

Hindley claims the school never told the nature of the complaint against him and was never given the chance to defend himself. Associated Press' Mark Pratt reports via The Boston Globe

"Protection of free speech and rules against discrimination are the bottom line in protecting minorities from the whims of the majority. Yet in the name of being “inclusive” and “welcoming” colleges have given a self selected group of little tyrants the right to decide what does and does not constitute offensive speech. In the end the majority will reassert itself and the very codes that were instituted to prevent minorities from being offended will be turned around and used against them." Reader commentary from Inside Higher Ed's coverage of the Brandeis story

No Athiests In Foxholes... Or MySpace

MySpace deleted the 35,000-member "Atheist and Agnostic Group" on Jan. 1, a little more than a month after hackers broke in and renamed the group's site "Jesus Is Love."

MySpace has ignored repeated requests to restore the group's site. A MySpace spokeswoman did not return calls seeking comment.

The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer's David Briggs reports

Afghan Student Sentenced To Death for Blasphemy

23-year-old Afghan student Sayed Pervez Kambaksh was arrested in 2007 after downloading material from a Farsi website, which criticized Muslims who use misinterpretations of the Koran to justify their oppression of women.

Kambaksh distributed the information to fellow students and teachers at Balkh University with the aim, he said, of provoking a debate on the matter. He was subsequently arrested, tried by religious judges (reportedly without being allowed legal representation), and sentenced to death.

A statement supporting the death sentence was issued by the leader of the Afghan Senate, Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, an ally of President Hamid Karzai.

BBC News reports

Comment from Daniel Dennett: "The 'tolerance' urged by many voices outside the Muslim world played into the hands of the radical Islamists."

More in Secular Philosophy

The "Boogeyman of Polite Society"

"Was Mr. Wilders asserting a right to free speech?

Or was he dressing up a gratuitous religious insult in constitutional language?

He was doing both, of course."

The Financial Times' Christopher Caldwell "In Defence Of The Right To Offend"

A story based on the Three Little Pigs fairy tale has been deemed potentially offensive to Muslims by a British government agency.

The BBC's Sean Coughlan reports

Free Speech For Me, But Not For Thee

A court in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif today passed the death sentence on a young journalist, Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, for alleged blasphemy. The trial was held behind closed doors and without any lawyer defending him.

The court also threatened to arrest any reporters who protested against Kambakhsh's sentence.

The BBC reports

Black Balled

"The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity. It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough. This is not science. To question this is not to give in to racism."

So says Nobel Prize-winning DNA pioneer James Watson, seeking to clarify remarks that eventually earned him a suspension from his research institution, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, NY.

In a recent (London) Times interview, Dr. Watson was quoted as saying that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really."

The remarks drew sharp criticism, and following the suspension, he stated: "This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers."

Read the BBC News' report here

Frustrated by press leaks about its most sensitive electronic surveillance work, the secretive National Security Agency convened an unprecedented series of off-the-record "seminars" in recent years to teach reporters about the damage caused by such leaks and to discourage reporting that could interfere with the agency's mission to spy on America's enemies.

The New York Sun's Josh Gerstien reports

Kill Hill... Or No Bill
Celebrity Culture and the Campaign

Early this summer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president learned that the men’s magazine GQ was working on a story the campaign was sure to hate: an account of infighting in Hillaryland.

So Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists and offered GQ a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity coverboy Bill Clinton. Despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands.

The spiked GQ story shows how the Clinton campaign has been able to use its access to the most important commodity in media — celebrity, and in fact two bona fide celebrities — to shape not just what gets written about the candidate, but also what doesn’t.

There’s nothing unusual about providing extra access to reporters seen as sympathetic, and cutting off those seen as hostile to a campaign. But a retreat of the sort GQ is alleged to have made is unusual, particularly as part of what sources described as a barely veiled transaction of editorial leverage for access.

Politco's Ben Smith reports

Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee

Islamist Orders Hit on Cartoonist and Editor
The head of an al Qaeda-led group in Iraq has offered a $100,000 reward for the killing of a Swedish cartoonist for his drawing of Islam's Prophet Mohammad and threatened to attack major Swedish companies. Reuters' Diala Saadeh reports

Woman Sues Judge Over Language Restrictions
The accuser in a sexual assault case is suing a judge because he barred the word "rape," "victim" and "assailant" and other words from the trial. Read the AP report at Law.com

Ridiculously Rich Guy Buys Respect
Since 2002, Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, has used his considerable financial clout as one of the richest men in the world to garner apologies and damages through the UK courts. Recently, his attention has been turned to respected academic publisher Cambridge University Press, over the book "Alms for Jihad."

The book's authors firmly deny bin Mahfouz’s claims that their book links him, financially and through family, to Osama bin Laden. However, CUP recent issued an outright apology, declared that it would pulp all unsold copies of the book in the UK, and requested that library copies be returned to meet the same fate. Such is the fear of bin Mahfouz that even US-based Amazon is not selling "Alms for Jihad," instead, somewhat disingenuously, offering a 557-word review for the knock-down price of $9.95. Read more in the Index On Censorship

Transsexual Harassment

To many of Dr. Bailey’s peers, his story is a morality play about the corrosive effects of political correctness on academic freedom.

In 2003, Dr. J. Michael Bailey published “The Man Who Would Be Queen,” a book intended to explain the biology of sexual orientation and gender to a general audience.

He argued that some people born male who want to cross genders are driven primarily by an erotic fascination with themselves as women. This idea runs counter to the belief, held by many men who decide to live as women, that they are the victims of a biological mistake — in essence, women trapped in men’s bodies.

Days after the book appeared, Lynn Conway, a prominent computer scientist at the University of Michigan, sent out an e-mail message comparing Dr. Bailey’s views to Nazi propaganda. She and other transgender women found the tone of the book abusive, and the theory of motivation it presented to be a recipe for further discrimination.

Dr. Alice Dreger, an ethics scholar, is a longtime advocate for people born with ambiguous sexuality and has been strongly critical of sex researchers in the past. She said she had presumed that Dr. Bailey was guilty of scientific ethics violations.

But in her just-completed account, due to be published next year in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, the field’s premier journal, she concluded that the accusations against the psychologist were essentially groundless.

Some scientists say that it has become increasingly treacherous to discuss politically sensitive issues. They point to several recent cases, like that of Helmuth Nyborg, a Danish researcher who was fired in 2006 after he caused a furor in the press by reporting a slight difference in average I.Q. test scores between the sexes.

The New York Times' Benedict Carey Reports

Free Speech For Me,

But Not For Thee

Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, attacked last week at the launch of her book in southern India, faces up to two years in jail if found guilty on a charge of inciting religious tensions. The Guardian's Richard Lee reports

Meanwhile, a Muslim fundamentalist group has revived a long-standing fatwa on Nasrin, stating that she “has spoken against Islam and Prophet Muhammad and we will go to any extent to eliminate her.” An unlimited amount of money is offered to anyone who will kill her. The Hindustan Times' Rakeeb Hossain reports