National Free Speech News & Commentary

Eric Kelderman
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: The accrediting group that oversees about 170 colleges in California and Hawaii is considering cutting the words “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion” from the standards that its member colleges must meet.

The WASC Senior College and University Commission is considering the changes as conservative lawmakers at both the state and federal level consider ways to curb the authority of accreditors and eliminate any consideration of DEI on college campuses.

Nicholas Confessore and Steve Friess
New York Times

Excerpt: The University of Michigan will no longer require diversity statements as part of faculty hiring, promotion and tenure decisions, the school announced on Thursday, marking a major shift at one of the country’s leading public research institutions.

The new policy, issued by Michigan’s provost, comes as the university’s regents weigh a broader overhaul of its sprawling diversity, equity and inclusion programs, among the most ambitious and well financed in the country.

Radley Balko
The Watch, Substack

Excerpt: Donald Trump has never had much tolerance for the free press. Throughout his first term he demanded we “open up the libel laws” to make it easier to sue journalists for unflattering coverage — which, more than anything else, reveals that he doesn’t really understand how any of this works.

Jack Grove
Times Higher Education

Excerpt: More than three-quarters of university staff feel academic freedom of speech is more restricted in their country than it was 10 years ago, a major survey has found.

This sense that free speech on campus has been chilled is particularly strong in the US, where 83 per cent of respondents felt this was the case, and in psychology (80 per cent) and clinical health (89 per cent), where sex and gender issues loom large.

Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Last Dec. 5, the presidents of three leading universities stepped before Congress for a hearing on campus antisemitism that was widely criticized when they failed to offer forthright responses on whether hypothetical calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their institutions’ policies. Those three presidents—representing Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—were followed by four others in two separate hearings in April and May as pro-Palestinian student protests swept campuses across the nation last spring.

Of the seven campus leaders who testified, only two remain on the job (though one was already on the way out). Here’s a look at where all seven leaders are today.

Yascha Mounk
Persuasion

Excerpt: Cass Sunstein is an American legal scholar and the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard University. Sunstein was the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under Barack Obama, and is considered to be the most widely cited legal scholar in the United States. Sunstein is the author, with Richard Thaler, of Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, The World According to Star Wars, and Campus Free Speech: A Pocket Guide.

In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and Cass Sunstein discuss his “law of group polarization” and how it contributes to today’s factionalism; how echo chambers work (and why social media makes them worse); and whether meeting the challenge of misinformation requires new government regulations.