Top University of Illinois administrators have asked a faculty committee to consider whether the Urbana-Champaign campus violated the academic freedom of an adjunct professor of Roman Catholicism who lost his job after his remarks about homosexuality offended a student, the News-Gazette, a local paper, reported. The instructor, Kenneth Howell, has blamed the loss of his job on a student's complaint about how he discussed the morality of homosexual acts in an e-mail. Michael J. Hogan, president of the University of Illinois system, told the newspaper he had received at least 100 e-mails about the widely publicized case. "We want to be able to reassure ourselves that there was no infringement on academic freedom here," the paper quoted him as telling the Urbana-Champaign's faculty senate, whose committee on academic freedom and tenure has been asked to conduct the review.

The American Association of University Professors has joined two other groups in urging Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to review the State Department's decision to deny a visa to the prominent Colombian journalist Hollman Morris. According to the Associated Press, Mr. Morris is attempting to travel to the United States to participate in Harvard University's Nieman fellowship program for journalists, but he was denied a visa by a U.S. consular official who cited language in the U.S. Patriot Act intended to keep people with terrorism connections out of the country. Mr. Morris has criticized ties between illegal far-right militias and allies of Colombia's departing president, Álvaro Uribe, a key U.S. ally who in turn has accused Mr. Morris of being an accomplice to terrorists. In a letter sent today to Secretary Clinton, the AAUP, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the PEN...

The U.S. Supreme Court today upheld a California public law school's policy of denying official recognition to student groups with membership rules it regards as discriminatory. In a 5-to-4 decision, the court's liberal wing was joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in holding that the law school's requirement that student groups accept all comers -- and not reject people from membership based on their beliefs -- is reasonable and viewpoint neutral, and therefore does not conflict with the First Amendment. The case at issue stemmed from a lawsuit brought against the University of California's Hastings College of Law by the Christian Legal Society, which argued that the law school's policy infringed on the First Amendment rights of religious groups that wanted to ensure members shared their beliefs.

The University of California at Berkeley has cleared Peter H. Duesberg, a biologist there, of charges of wrongdoing stemming from a journal article in which he and another researcher wrote that there is no proof that HIV causes AIDS. The university's vice provost for academic affairs and faculty welfare, Sheldon Zedeck, told Mr. Duesberg in a letter sent last month that the university was not judging the validity of the article, which had been published in the journal Medical Hypotheses and later withdrawn. But, Mr. Zedeck said, officials there have insufficient evidence to pursue any disciplinary action over charges that Mr. Duesberg had violated the faculty code of conduct, and had determined his statements in Medical Hypotheses were "protected under the umbrella of academic freedom." Two formal complaints filed with the university in connection with the article had accused Mr....

Several prominent supporters of California's Proposition 209, which barred public colleges from considering applicants' race and ethnicity, are seeking a role in defending the measure from a lawsuit challenging it as unconstitutional. Their motion to intervene as defendants in the case argues that the defendants now named in the lawsuit—Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the University of California's Board of Regents—cannot be counted on to put up a strong fight on behalf of the preference ban, which the state's voters passed in 1996. The intervention motion was filed by Ward Connerly, a former University of California regent who helped lead the campaign for Proposition 209; the American Civil Rights Foundation, which Mr. Connerly established; and the California affiliate of the National Association of Scholars. The Pacific Legal Foundation is representing them.

A federal judge has ruled against a former librarian at Ohio State University at Mansfield who claimed he had been forced out of his job after formally recommending that the institution require freshmen to read a book alleging a gay conspiracy to damage society. Rejecting the arguments of the former librarian, Scott A. Savage, and the Alliance Defense Fund, which backed him, Judge William O. Bertelsman of U.S. District Court found no evidence that the university had violated the free-speech rights of Mr. Savage after he recommended freshmen read David Kupelian's The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom (WND Books, 2005). Although Mr. Savage became the target of animosity and complaints from professors over his recommendation, which the university did not follow, he could not claim to have been severely harmed because he did...

A study of Berea College students has found that white students who were randomly assigned black roommates as freshmen had a significantly larger proportion of black friends over their time in college than white peers whose first-year roommate was also white. A paper summarizing the study cautions that it focuses on just one institution and student relations may be different elsewhere. Nevertheless, it says, the Berea findings suggest that students may begin college with misperceptions of incompatibility with students of other races that certain forms of interracial contact can help alleviate. The authors of the study are Todd R. Stinebrickner, a professor of economics, and Braz Camargo, an assistant professor of economics,  both at the University of Western Ontario, and Ralph Stinebrickner, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Berea College.

Adopting a stand urged by the College Art Association and other free-speech advocates, the U.S. Supreme Court today struck down a 1999 federal law intended to keep people from selling dogfighting videos or otherwise profiting from depictions of animal cruelty. In an 8-to-1 decision, the court held that the law banning depictions of animal cruelty was overly broad and threatened speech protected under the First Amendment. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called "startling and dangerous" the federal government's suggestion that whether speech is protected should be determined by weighing its value against its societal cost. The lone dissenter in the decision, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., said that the First Amendment does not protect the sort of violent criminal conduct that goes into making cruelty videos, and the harm caused by such crimes "vastly outweighs any...

The prominent conservative political pundit Michael S. Adams is appealing a U.S. District Court's ruling that the University of North Carolina at Wilmington did not discriminate against him based on his political views and religious beliefs in denying him a promotion in his other job, as a faculty member teaching criminology. In a statement announcing the appeal, lawyers with the Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing Mr. Adams, argue that the district-court judge erred in holding that Mr. Adams's opinion columns were not protected under the First Amendment because he made reference to them in a promotion application. The American Association of University Professors is likely to file a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Mr. Adams, the group's senior counsel, Rachel Levinson, told The Washington Times.