National Free Speech News & Commentary

Vimal Patel
New York Times

Excerpt: The toppling of the University of Pennsylvania’s president, Elizabeth Magill — four days after her testimony before Congress on whether to punish students if they called for genocide — was a victory for those who believe that pro-Palestinian protesters have gone too far in their speech.

For many longtime observers of the campus speech wars, however, this moment is a dire one for freedom of expression.

Heather Mac Donald
City Journal

Excerpt: The pro-Hamas uprising that broke out across American universities after October 7 roused once-somnolent alumni and donors. That awakening has now produced a new university charter, called a “Vision for a New Future of the University of Pennsylvania,” drafted by Penn professors. The charter’s authors, along with Penn’s rebel donors, hope to make agreement with the new constitution a requirement for Penn’s new president.

Penn 2.0 overcomes in one stroke a weakness bedeviling a central strategy of campus reform. Those seeking to create new universities face the challenge that no new institution can offer the prize that a legacy university confers: status and bragging rights. It is prestige that drives the ever-more frenzied torrent of college applications, rather than any promise of knowledge. The beauty of the Penn 2.0 plan is that it re-founds Penn on a new footing, while maintaining Penn’s prestige-granting power.

James Kirchick
New York Times

Excerpt: The tentative, lawyerly answers given last week by three university presidents at a House committee hearing investigating the state of antisemitism on America’s college campuses have generated widespread revulsion across the partisan divide. When none of the presidents — representing Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania — could muster a straightforward reply to the question from Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, about whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” amounted to “bullying or harassment,” many prominent Democrats joined Republicans in denouncing the testimony.

But two wrongs don’t make a right. If the problem with campus speech codes is the selectivity with which universities penalize various forms of bigotry, the solution is not to expand the university’s power to punish expression. It’s to abolish speech codes entirely.

Niall Ferguson
The Free Press

Excerpt: Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill ethical values has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich. A university degree, far from inoculating Germans against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it.

Emma Camp
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, college campuses around the country have been embroiled in intense anti-Israel protests. Elite college campuses have seen particularly aggressive demonstrations that have frequently included outright support for Hamas.

While First Amendment advocates have expressed hope that these recent controversies would show just how easily abused anti "hate speech" rules on college campuses are, many administrators seem to be taking the opposite position, advocating for more censorship, not less.

John Tomasi
Heterodox Academy

Excerpt: College and university responses to the October 7 attacks by Hamas, and the subsequent response by Israel, have put questions of campus culture in the public spotlight like never before. The clumsy and tone-deaf statements by university presidents in the immediate wake of the attack and, even more dramatically, before Congress last week, have served to deepen public distrust in higher education and its values.

As a nonpartisan membership organization dedicated to open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement, HxA takes no position on the moral and political questions raised by the conflict in the Middle East. We do take a position on what role higher education should play.