OntheWilderSide

Latest advice to students of the international program is to YES study Wikileaks.

Full story: here.

Now, SIPA Dean John H. Coatsworth has clarified the school’s policy and issued a ringing endorsement of free speech and academic freedom.

“Freedom of information and expression is a core value of our institution,” Coatsworth wrote in an e-mail to the SIPA community Monday morning (full e-mail message below). “Thus, SIPA’s position is that students have a right to discuss and debate any information in the public arena that they deem relevant to their studies or to their roles as global citizens, and to do so without fear of adverse consequences.”

SIPA Professor Gary Sick, the prominent Middle East expert who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan, went even further in repudiating the memo.

“If anyone is a master’s student in international relations and they haven’t heard of WikiLeaks and gone looking for the documents that relate to their area of study, then they don’t deserve to be a graduate student in international relations,” Sick told Wired.com in an interview.

Still, the school says it will pass on any official State Department WikiLeaks guidelines, if and when it gets them. –  wired.com

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P.S. Since governments are trying to suppress Wikileaks, I think it is sometimes difficult to find the webpage. One way to find the current location/address is to “google news” wikileaks. I found a good link for Wikileaks: here as of Monday morning. I will try to update this once and awhile with links to get to Wikileaks.

Filed under: international politics, News, politics, progressive politics, US Politics Tagged: | academic freedom, address for Wikileaks, advice on Wikileaks, Columbia, Columbia University, find Wikileaks, Free Speech, Free Speech and Wikileaks, students, Wikileaks