By Peter Schmidt. Last week’s terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical newspaper that had published images of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, is prompting renewed criticism of Yale University Press’s controversial decision to redact similar cartoons from a scholarly book published in 2009.
That book, The Cartoons That Shook the World, focused on a global crisis that had erupted four years earlier over the publication of 12 caricatures of Muhammad by a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. The Yale press cited fears of inciting violence in removing the cartoons and all other illustrations, including recent and historical images of the Muslim prophet, from the book before publishing it.
The decision was widely criticized by the American Association of University Professors and other academic and free-speech advocacy groups, several of which cited it as part of a troubling trend in which colleges were surrendering the free exchange of ideas in response to threats.
In some respects, last week’s attacks in France, in which Islamist gunmen killed 12 people at Charlie Hebdo’s offices and five other people elsewhere, appeared to confirm that Yale University Press’s fears might have had some basis. But in an article published on Tuesday in the Yale Daily News, a student newspaper, and in op-eds printed elsewhere, people close to the Yale press’s decision and other scholars have cited the killings in France as reason to argue that the university press should have included cartoons in the book to take a stand in support of academic freedom and free speech. More...

By Casey Fabris. Conversations about the atomic bomb can go only so far among a classroom of 20-somethings. It’s hard for today’s students to imagine living in 1945, experiencing a world war, or, for most, serving in the military. More...

By Madeline Will. Here’s a downside to our cultural obsession with genius: It might be a reason for the gender gap in certain academic fields. New research has found that women tend to be underrepresented in disciplines whose practitioners think innate talent or "brilliance" is required to succeed. According to the findings, that’s true across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the STEM fields; humanities; and the social sciences. More...

By Robert Zaretsky. This year I marked my 25th year of teaching by losing my campus office. Not literally, of course: The room is where it has always been. But the door has shed my children’s drawings and fading New Yorker cartoons (some having aged better than others), the shelves swept of uncollected student papers and multiple desk copies of Voltaire’s Candide (have I taught the book that many times?), and the desk drawers emptied of handwritten lecture notes and thank-you cards from students. More...

By Roberta Ness. Are you as innovative as you want to be? Although eight of 10 respondents in a poll of thousands of workers from the United States, Europe, and Japan in 2012 said creativity was critical to unlocking global economic potential, only one in four felt they were fulfilling their own creative potential. Almost half complained that they don’t have the skills to be as imaginative as they could be. More...

By Clancy Martin. Practically speaking, I’ve always been interested in lying. But I remember when the subject first caught my intellectual attention: I was 11 or 12, in a Waldenbooks, and the shelves of the philosophy section—I’ve walked straight to that aisle since I was a kid, with my dad, who loved philosophy, though he was kicked out of college after only one semester—were lined with copies of Sissela Bok’s best-selling Lying. I was nervous even to pick it up, fearing, as many people do, that taking an interest in lies would expose that I was a liar. More...