Category: UW Experts in the News

“Under the present deployments the legality of the orders is dubious, but historically it’s not within the ken of any individual service members to make a decision,” said John W. Hall, a professor of military history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Michael Ford is Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Citizenship and Civil Dialogue at UW. As his organization works to encourage healthy political dialogue on Wisconsin’s college campuses, he worries that people are beginning to see civil discourse as a sign of weakness.

“My real fear is that the next generation of leaders are going to think politics is all about threats of violence and what-about-ism,” Ford said. “And when we get to that point, we’re ceding the space to the most extreme elements of our society.”

Donald Downs, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, led the charge to successfully fend off speech codes in the 1990s that would have disproportionately targeted conservative ideas at the historically liberal Madison campus. Downs thinks UT is overreaching if it tries to fire Shirinian.

“Who is threatened by what this professor said?” Downs said. “I think what she said was deplorable, and I think there are too many academics that are running around with those kind of ideas that are detrimental. But she’s got due process protections, she has certain academic freedom protections and extramural speech, and those have to be respected, too, especially because of the consequences of not doing that.”

Exile was once a common punishment in ancient times. Now, more and more journalists and other dissidents are going into self-imposed exile in order to avoid being imprisoned or otherwise targeted in their home countries, says Tomás Dodds, a University of Wisconsin–Madison assistant professor who has researched exiled journalists. “You live in a constant state of dissonance.”

Following that high, Bradley Carl, the co-director of the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Education Research, said the Madison Metropolitan School District’s reduced staffing vacancies are “obviously good news.”

“There’s some pretty good evidence that COVID led to a spike,” Carl said. “It might turn out to be a short-term spike, but COVID was very challenging for a teaching profession in lots of ways.”

UW-Madison educational policy professor Taylor Odle describes the impacts of the Direct Admit Wisconsin and Wisconsin Guarantee programs on UW system admissions of high school students from the state.

While officially adopted by the IHRA in 2016, the definition has been in use for about 20 years, according to Chad Alan Goldberg, a sociologist and professor of Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said it’s a response to rising antisemitism in recent decades, with an additional increase since the war between Israel and Hamas after Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7, 2023.

UW-Madison Law School Professor Anuj Desai said while your words might cost you a job, free speech generally shields you from government punishment.

Steven Brooke at the University of Wisconsin-Madison detailed “important mistakes of fact and interpretation.” Neil Russell, an academic in Scotland, called the U.S. conclusions “a mischaracterization of my findings.” Marie Vannetzel, a French scholar who has conducted field research with Al-Gameya Al-Shareya, rebutted what she called “a dishonest manipulation of my text and my work.”