Academic freedom

When it comes to incriminating videos these days, the one of Bruce K. Waltke might seem pretty tame. It shows the noted evangelical scholar of the Old Testament talking about scholarship, faith and evolution. What was incriminating? He not only endorsed evolution, but said that evangelical Christianity could face a crisis for not coming to accept science.

On March 4, as thousands of students and faculty across California took to the streets to protest budget cuts and tuition increases across the state’s university system, Ricardo Dominguez, an associate professor of visual arts at the San Diego campus, engineered a demonstration of a different kind.

Dominique G. Homberger won't apologize for setting high expectations for her students.

The University of Florida has lifted a ban on two graduate students using footage they shot in Haiti -- after the earthquake and at a time when the university barred student travel to the country -- in their master's thesis about aid workers.

Kenneth Ng calls his Web site a primer for tourists headed to Thailand, but Fodor’s it ain’t.

The devastation of Hurricane Ike, which struck Galveston on September 13, 2008, is not in dispute. But the way the University of Texas Medical Branch on Galveston Island responded -- especially its elimination of hundreds of jobs -- has been much debated.

W. King Mott, associate professor of political science and gender studies at Seton Hall University, clearly has earned respect from colleagues at the Roman Catholic institution. He has tenure. He recently finished a term as chair of the Faculty Senate. He served on the search committee for a new president.

Overturning the ruling of a lower court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has granted Arizona’s Maricopa Community College District immunity from a lawsuit filed by a group of Latino professors who charged that college officials had not sufficiently disciplined a colleague who sent e-mails they viewed as discriminatory.

Freshmen who entered Ohio State University at Mansfield in the fall of 2006 are about to graduate. A legal battle set off by the selection of a book for them all to read their first semester only came to a close on Monday -- when a federal judge rejected a former librarian's lawsuit against the university.

Canada -- a country with a tradition of academic freedom and strong faculty unions -- is having a major debate over what academic freedom is and who should define it.