“University suspends philosophy professors after sit-in over closure” plus 1 more

University suspends philosophy professors after sit-in over closure

Posted: 27 May 2010 04:16 AM PDT

Academics have been suspended by a university after staging a sit-in over the closure of their department.

Middlesex University disciplined two professors, one senior lecturer and four students after they occupied the philosophy department for 12 days this month. Staff and students are to hold fresh demonstrations later today against the suspensions and the decision to close the faculty.

Campaigners claim there is no justification for shutting the department, which has an international reputation and was the universitys highest rated research section. The Government this week announced a further £200 million of cuts to national university budgets, on top of almost £1 billion of reductions set out by Labour.

Universities are preparing to make thousands of redundancies and turn away hundreds of thousands of students. Leading academics from around the world have written in support of the Middlesex protesters. Professor Peter Hallward, one of the suspended lecturers, said: "The Middlesex philosophy programmes are among the most successful and highly regarded of their kind in the UK. There are no credible academic or financial grounds for closing them down."

The others who have been suspended are Professor Peter Osborne, head of Middlesex's Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, and senior lecturer Dr Christian Kerslake.

Professor Osborne, who has taught there for more than 20 years, said: "I'm annoyed, to put it mildly. The suspension is unjustified because there's no specific allegation against me.

"The university is deliberately using the suspension to keep us from informing our colleagues about the details of the programme's closure. This is a spasm of managerial self-destruction. It's extraordinary."

The academics are all banned from contacting each other or their students without university permission. The occupation ended after the university obtained a High Court injunction.

A University spokesman said: "The suspensions are part of standard policy to enable a thorough internal investigation into alleged misconduct to proceed unhindered.

"The university has to intervene when protest is illegal or puts the health and safety of staff at risk."

Add your view

No comments have so far been submitted.

Add your comment

Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Souter Presents Judicial Philosophy in Commencement Speech

Posted: 27 May 2010 11:51 PM PDT

As he stood before thousands of Harvard alumni, former Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter '61 did not take his audience's intelligence for granted, using his Commencement address to argue against limiting Constitutional interpretation to mere textual analysis.

Souter, 70, who stepped down from the high court in 2009, avoided legal jargon and offered what audience members called an accessible explanation of his judicial philosophy.

In his 30-minute speech, the thin, gray-haired man from New Hampshire—who has been associated with the court's liberal wing—argued that "Constitutional judging is not a mere combination of fair reading and simple facts."

Souter offered a rebuttal of what he termed "the fair reading model," which calls for an analysis of the Constitution that is grounded in the language of the Constitution—at the expense of a more nuanced analysis that considers the contemporary values and outlooks that can shape judicial decisions.

In his criticism of the model, Souter considered two famous decisions handed down by the nation's most powerful court: the Pentagon Papers case in 1971 and Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954.

While the Court ultimately found that the United States did not have enough evidence to prohibit The New York Times and The Washington Post from printing classified documents about the Vietnam War, Souter said the case demonstrated that the Court does not uphold the absolute inviolability of the First Amendment.

"Even the First Amendment, then, expressing the value of speech and publications in the terms of a right as paramount as any fundamental can be, does not quite get to the point of an absolute guarantee," Souter said.

Instead, opposing provisions of the Constitution must be reconciled to come to the final decision, he added.

The fair reading model, Souter noted, fails because the Constitution must be "read as a whole, and when it is, other values crop up in potential conflict with an unfettered right to publish, the value of security for the nation and the value of the President's authority in matters foreign and military."

In her remarks to alumni minutes before Souter's speech, University President Drew G. Faust praised the justice's dedication to public service.

Phil Bakker, whose son graduated from the College this spring, said that he enjoyed Souter's speech and said that he "better understood what it takes to be a justice" afterwards.

Superior Court Judge William L. Downing, a parent of a Harvard Kennedy School graduate, said that he was glad that Souter did not feel the need to pander to the audience.

"It's a rather intelligent gathering," he said. He added that while the justice's speech was about judicial philosophy, "it was inspiring in its own way."

Last year Secretary of Energy and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu gave the Commencement address. Renowned journalist Christiane Amanpour delivered this year's Class Day speech.

—Staff writer Eric P. Newcomer can be reached at newcomer@fas.harvard.edu.

Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Philosophy

Friday, May 28, 2010