National Free Speech News & Commentary

Dialogue Vanderbilt, Vanderbilt University

Excerpt: From our beginning, we’ve believed in the power of bringing together people of differing viewpoints for a common purpose. A long-standing commitment to free expression is fundamental to who we are.

At Vanderbilt, we have a long tradition of free expression. At a moment when free expression on college campuses and in American civic life is at risk, we are proud to affirm our commitment to this core principle.

Josh Blackman
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

[Editor’s note: The original image was pulled from Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine’s Instagram and replaced with one that does not feature bloody utensils]

Excerpt: Back in October, UC Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky wrote that "Nothing has prepared me for the antisemitism I see on college campuses now." At the time, I praised Erwin's bold remarks, though I feared things would only get worse. And they have.

Last week, Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine depicted Dean Chemerinsky in a cartoon with blood-soaked utensils. This image appeals to the ancient blood libel that has pervaded anti-semitic propaganda for millennia. That students thought this image was appropriate is shocking. Failure to use the appropriate pronouns is immediately grounds for cancellation. But invoking the trope that Jews eat children is just another meme.

Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack

Excerpt: About a decade ago, I had a weird idea. At the time, I had for 13 years defended free speech and academic freedom in higher education at FIRE — then the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, now and Expression — but something began to change around 2014. There was a sudden surge in attempts to deplatform speakers, and students were arriving on campus requesting things I’d never heard of, like “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces,” and the policing of “microaggressions.”

I was developing a theory about what happened, but I wanted to talk it through with someone knowledgeable. That’s when I asked Jonathan Haidt out to lunch to discuss it. Jon is a world-renowned social psychologist and professor at New York University. We met at an Indian restaurant near his campus, and I started to lay out my thoughts. What followed was the beginning of a working relationship and friendship that continues to this day.

Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Universities today feel understandably besieged. State legislators are intervening in curricular debates, members of Congress are taking aim at university presidents, and public support for college is at historic lows. Because criticism of the university from the outside comes most intensely from the right, and professors and administrators on the inside are mostly on the left, it is natural for insiders to respond to external critics by appealing to partisan passions, summoning one another to the barricades, and attempting to repel the barbarian onslaught.

Abigail Chachkes and Thor N. Reimann
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: Concerns about campus speech are taking Harvard by storm. Given the “worst score ever,” by college free speech watchdog FIRE, Harvard’s administration has put together initiative after initiative to bolster open dialogue on campus.

While most of the dialogue around free speech on college campuses focuses on classroom culture and student groups in more overtly political protest spaces, the comedy scene has flown under the radar — despite the fact that comedy is often a means of self-expression amid times of social and political unrest.

Paula Chakravartty and Vasuki Nesiah
New York Times

Excerpt: At New York University, the spring semester began with a poetry reading. Students and faculty gathered in the atrium of Bobst Library. At that time, about twenty-six thousand Palestinians had already been killed in Israel’s horrific war on Gaza; the reading was a collective act of bearing witness.

Soon after those lines were recited, the university administration shut the reading down. Afterward, we learned that students and faculty members were called into disciplinary meetings for participating in this apparently “disruptive” act; written warnings were issued.