National Free Speech News & Commentary

Abigail Shrier
The Free Press

Excerpt: A police officer who pulls over speeding black motorists—and only black motorists—isn’t protecting “law and order.” He’s engaging in invidious discrimination. So too the university administrators who suddenly discover they are free speech absolutists only when student protesters call for the death of their Jewish classmates.

Michael Brendan Dougherty
National Review

Excerpt: Conservatives have sought to prevent the encampments from spreading by drawing strong distinctions between free-speech protections for the students and standards of manners, anti-harassment regulations, and the like. This may be what is legally required of state universities like the University of Florida, where Ben Sasse made those distinctions as clear as possible.

But it’s entirely inadequate for the role that Columbia and the other Ivy League colleges want to play in our republic. The standard is not just free speech, or more speech to counter bad speech, but truthful speech.

Ted Balaker
The Coddling of the American Mind Movie, Substack

Excerpt: Most of our “DVD extras” are paywalled, but we’re making this one available to everyone. In it, Jonathan Haidt touches on the role universities, specifically administrators, play in encouraging students to think in binary terms, to see the world as battle between good and evil.

Jon references the work of Samuel Abrams, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College. Abrams conducted a national survey of college administrators who work directly with students. He found that “liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one.” That makes administrators the most left-lopsided group on campus

Jim Vertuno, Cedar Attanasio, Jake Offenhartz and Jonathan Mattise
Associated Press

Excerpt: Dozens of protesters took over a building at Columbia University in New York early Tuesday, barricading the entrances and unfurling a Palestinian flag out of a window in the latest escalation of demonstrations against the Israel-Hamas war that have spread to college campuses nationwide.

Video footage showed protesters on Columbia’s Manhattan campus locking arms in front of Hamilton Hall early Tuesday and carrying furniture and metal barricades to the building, one of several that was occupied during a 1968 civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protest on the campus. Posts on an Instagram page for protest organizers shortly after midnight urged people to protect the encampment and join them at Hamilton Hall. A “Free Palestine” banner hung from a window.

PEN America Press Release

Excerpt: We continue to be deeply alarmed by the decision of campus administrators across the country to deploy the police to detain, arrest, and remove peaceful student protesters. The use of excessive force against students and faculty on multiple occasions is shocking and unacceptable.
Engaging police to deal with peaceful protests represents an escalation that is inimical to the exercise of free expression and to a learning environment, and further raises the risk of use of excessive force; except in extreme cases, the use of outside police against student protesters is the wrong decision and only serves to ratchet up tensions.

Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack

Excerpt: 1. The situation on campus for free speech has been bad for a long time.

If you’re tired of hearing it, believe me, I’m tired of saying it — but it needs to be said, over and over, until people finally get it and start doing something to fix it.

I’ve been fighting for free speech on campus since I started at FIRE back in 2001. Indeed, FIRE was founded in response to a growing free speech crisis in higher education, and that was in 1999! The situation was worse than I thought back when I started, and it has reached crisis level over the past decade.