Your Cart is Empty
FIRE
Excerpt: Last week, an assassin silenced speech on a college campus. A family lost a father and a husband. As we have said without equivocation, political violence is never an acceptable response to free speech.
Appropriately, we can expect colleges and universities to place even greater emphasis on safety and security ahead of outside speakers arriving on campus moving forward. They have a moral and legal obligation to redouble their efforts to protect free speech as well as their campus community. However, administrators must not pass those security costs along to speakers or use security concerns as pretext to cancel a speaker’s appearance. Rewarding threats of violence by taxing speech or silencing speakers will only invite more threats and more violence.
Comments will be approved before showing up.
I recently listened to Ross Douthat’s interview with the philosopher Jennifer Frey. She is a serious thinker and an unusually courageous academic entrepreneur. What she built at the University of Tulsa before it was dismantled is exactly the sort of thing more universities should be attempting. Yet almost every argument she offered for the humanities is, I think, completely unpersuasive to anyone not already on our side of the table.
This report presents findings from a national survey of 1,959 law school faculty at 192 American Bar Association (ABA) approved law schools in the United States, conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). As one of the largest surveys of law faculty on free expression and professional norms, the data reveal a profession that strongly endorses free speech principles while struggling to live them out in practice.
I just returned from the University of Wyoming, where I debated the President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Todd Wolfson over the need for colleges and universities to maintain institutional neutrality. The debate was organized by the Steamboat Institute and was live-streamed.
The formal question presented for debate was: “Is institutional neutrality necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry rather than an actor in political disputes?” I spoke in favor of institutional neutrality while Wolfson argued against it as a necessary component to higher education.
