National Free Speech News & Commentary

Collin Binkley, Annie Ma and Noreen Nasir
Associated Press

Excerpt: When she started writing her college essay, Hillary Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted it all. When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. For many students of color, instantly more was riding on the already high-stakes writing assignment. Some say they felt pressure to exploit their hardships as they competed for a spot on campus.

Walter Russell Mead
Tablet

Excerpt: Impostor syndrome isn’t always a voice of unwarranted self-doubt that you should stifle. Sometimes, it is the voice of God telling you to stand down. If, for example, you are an academic with a track record of citation lapses, you might not be the right person to lead a famous university through a critical time.

The spectacle of the presidents of three important American universities reduced to helpless gibbering in a 2023 congressional hearing may have passed from the news cycle, but it will resonate in American politics and culture for a long time. Even so, discussing the core mission of their institutions before a national audience is an event that ought to have brought out whatever mental clarity, moral earnestness, and rhetorical skills that three leaders of major American institutions had. My fear is it did exactly that.

Theo Baker
The Atlantic

Excerpt: Israel is 7,500 miles away from Stanford’s campus, where I am a sophomore. But the Hamas invasion and the Israeli counterinvasion have fractured my university, a place typically less focused on geopolitics than on venture-capital funding for the latest dorm-based tech start-up. Few students would call for Biden’s head—I think—but many of the same young people who say they want peace in Gaza don’t seem to realize that they are in fact advocating for violence.

The extremism and anti-Semitism at Ivy League universities on the East Coast have attracted so much media and congressional attention that two Ivy presidents have lost their jobs. But few people seem to have noticed the culture war that has taken over our California campus.

Lauren Gutterman and Lisa L. Moore
Academe Blog

Excerpt: On February 22nd, 2024, Dr. Paige Schilt, a social worker, author, and former lecturer and staff member at the University of Texas at Austin, was scheduled to give a talk entitled “A Queer Path to Leadership: Finding a Mentor to Help You Succeed in Higher Education.” It was part of a lecture series at the university for first-year students sponsored by the undergraduate college. Schilt’s talk would have focused on navigating college and developing a support network.

But the undergraduate college pulled Schilt’s planned lecture at the last minute, replacing her with another speaker without public explanation. Upon questioning, administrators stated that UT Austin’s legal team had urged them not to permit the lecture because it risked violating Senate Bill (SB) 17, the anti-DEI law which went into effect in January.

Christopher Winship
The Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: There have been demands by faculty that the University better protect academic freedom and that the broader Harvard community better ensure civil, reasoned discourse. (For an important statement on inclusion and academic freedom, see Harvard’s 2018 Presidential Task Force Report on Inclusion and Belonging.)

I fully support such calls. I doubt, however, that they will change the behaviors of those who are genuinely convinced about the erroneousness of others’ beliefs and the validity of their own. I will make a different argument: that for academic freedom to prevail, all at Harvard must tolerate others and their beliefs.

Mark S. James
Academe Blog

Excerpt: Last August, my colleague wrote about how our university’s leadership has embraced a top-down corporate model as the way of running the university, and he proceeded to describe various instances when they have ignored shared governance and threatened academic freedom. This trend has continued unabated.

The most recent example of this is perhaps the most blatant, and it poses the most serious threat to academic freedom and shared governance yet. The administration is now deploying our office of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to impose a policy that has been rejected by our faculty two times now. But, as Nikole Hannah-Jones recently observed, DEI is now being used against efforts to increase diversity, promote equality, and foster inclusion.