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Academic Freedom Alliance statement on the assassination of Charlie Kirk
The Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA) is a coalition of faculty from across the country and across the ideological spectrum who are dedicated
to upholding the principles of academic freedom and free speech for faculty at colleges and universities throughout the US.
Located in Princeton, the AFA was founded by Keith Whittington, former Princeton professor of Politics now a professor at Yale Law School; Robert P. George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton; public intellectual and former Princeton professor Cornel West; Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor of law at Harvard Law School; and Nadine Strossen, the former national President of the American Civil Liberties Union and professor emerita at New York Law School. Since its founding in 2021 the AFA has grown its membership to over 900 faculty from across the country.
The AFA’s statement on the Assassination of Charlie Kirk stands out in its defense of the “basic freedom of those in academic communities to discuss, debate, and learn. It is the mission of the Academic Freedom Alliance to defend that indispensable freedom from anyone and everyone who threatens it.”
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The protests that greeted Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival a UCLA School of Law in April were not surprising. Law students, especially at highly ranked schools like UCLA, have become notoriously intolerant of disfavored speakers coming to campus — and few institutions are quite as polarizing as DHS in the “Abolish ICE” era. It was striking, however, that the students who organized the interruptions of Percival’s presentation — with heckling, hacking coughs, cellphones, and the occasional profanity — did exactly what “snowflake” students have been ridiculed and denounced for doing when encountering someone they don’t agree with.
What happens when an entire profession can’t see what’s hiding in plain sight in its own data? That puzzle animated Stony Brook University sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s keynote at the Heterodox Academy 2026 West Coast Regional Conference, held recently at UC Berkeley.
The deeper problem, he contends, is not bad-faith activism but a structural one: peer review, editing, and committee deliberation only correct for bias when the people doing the correcting actually differ from one another, and the academy and the press increasingly do not. His full speech is transcribed below.
Two years after protests over the Israel-Hamas war roiled college campuses, resulting in the arrests of more than 3,000 students and faculty, a new study finds that students generally oppose punishing “objectionable speech,” unless they consider it “highly harmful.”
The study, conducted by researchers from the Universities of Pennsylvania and Colorado and Stanford and Columbia Universities and published in April in Science Advances, also found that students’ views of objectionable speech depend largely on whom it is targeted at.
