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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.

Kathryn Palmer
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Some faculty members at Indiana University at Bloomington fear academic freedom on their campus is under attack by a local congressman reacting to claims of antisemitism among some members of the student government association.

The lawmaker, U.S. Representative Jim Banks, a conservative Republican and evangelical Christian who is running for U.S. Senate in 2024, has asked the university’s president to address allegations of antisemitism on campus related to the Israel-Hamas war or potentially risk losing federal funding

Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The Florida Board of Governors voted on Nov. 9 to remove the Principles of Sociology from the list of core courses that the state’s public college students can take to fulfill their general education requirements. The news shocked sociology professors across the state, who say the ripple effects of such a decision could be disastrous.

Students often rely on the course to satisfy the social sciences general education requirement. Indeed, many sociology departments consider it their bread and butter; at some of Florida’s largest institutions, the course can easily draw more than 100 students per section. It’s also the class where many sociology students first learn about the discipline.

Susan Greenberg
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The Iowa Board of Regents voted last week to cut back on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at the state’s three public universities, KCRG.com reported.

The regents approved a slate of 10 recommendations from a study group formed to review current policies at the behest of Governor Kim Reynolds, which essentially eliminate all DEI efforts that are not essential for the institutions’ compliance or accreditation.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: A professor is suing the Mayo Clinic medical school after a department chair threatened to fire him following a CNN interview in which he criticized the National Institutes of Health for not backing a COVID-19 treatment and a New York Times interview in which he said testosterone improves athletic performance.

Dr. Michael J. Joyner, an anesthesiology professor, filed the lawsuit Monday in a Minnesota state court in Olmsted County against the Mayo Clinic, Mayo’s College of Medicine and Science, Dr. Gianrico Farrugia and Dr. Carlos B. Mantilla.

Aaron Sibarium
The Free Press, Substack

Excerpt: In its own telling, Yale Law School’s Schell Center for International Human Rights seeks to “equip lawyers and other professionals with the knowledge and skills needed to advance the cause of international human rights.” The center has educated students and human rights professionals on atrocities large and small, issuing a detailed report last year on ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and proposing a framework in mid-September to moderate “indirect hate speech online”—whatever that means.

But six days after Hamas’ October 7 massacre over 1,400 Israelis and kidnapping of 240 more, the center was silent.

Bari Weiss
The Free Press, Substack

Excerpt: What is happening today on our college campuses—the places where our future leaders are nurtured, but more often pampered, pandered to, insulated, and infantilized—is not new. Since the very first days of The Free Press, we have been reporting on it.

But the need to restore wisdom, open inquiry, and common sense to our universities has never been more urgent than at this moment.  That’s why we’re sponsoring 1,000 paid yearlong subscriptions to The Free Press. And every college administrator in the country who wants one is eligible.

Freddie DeBoer
Substack

Excerpt: There was an essay version of this, but honestly I don’t think any essay writing is necessary - the systematic silencing of Palestinian and Palestine-supporting voices is happening, no one is even pretending that it’s not happening, and it’s a direct threat to the basic principles of free expression that are supposed to apply to everyone and every topic, no matter what.

Jonathan Sumption
Unherd

Excerpt: Freedom of expression is probably the most widely acknowledged human right in the world. Lip service is paid to it even in totalitarian states. Freedom of expression is not worth much in Russia or North Korea, but their constitutions guarantee it in very similar terms as the United Nations. And yet, it is today under greater threat than any other human right. This is happening even, perhaps especially, in liberal democracies. How are we to explain this paradox?

Jacob Mchangama
Persuasion

Excerpt: Open democracies should not retreat from the institutional and civic commitment to free expression, however ugly many of its current manifestations are. Freedom of expression serves its most important function at times of deep polarization, where the sense of righteous indignation tempts us to silence the viewpoints we hate with scant regard for the collateral damage to democracy, freedom, and tolerance that constitute the necessary precondition for social peace in diverse societies.

Julie Bonette
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Editor’s note: Yale Law School’s gain of Professor Whittington, a leading champion of and scholar of free speech and academic freedom, is Princeton’s loss.

Excerpt: After more than 25 years on Princeton’s faculty, politics professor Keith Whittington announced Oct. 16 that he will be leaving Princeton to join Yale University next fall as a professor of law and director of a new free speech and academic freedom center.

“I think in this particular moment in time, really trying to fully understand and defend academic freedom principles is terribly important, certainly to the university community, but I think to the country more generally, and I’m optimistic we can do some exciting things there,” Whittington told PAW.

American Council of Trustees and Alumni

Excerpt: On October 17, 2021, Princeton University alumni Stuart Taylor, Jr., and Edward Yingling published a call to arms in the Wall Street Journal, decrying the illiberal intolerance gripping academia and heralding the rise of a grassroots alumni movement aimed at restoring free speech and academic freedom on American college campuses.

Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: In the face of Hamas’s atrocities, some U.S. college administrators at first said little or issued equivocating mush, such as what Dartmouth College put out Tuesday in its “Statement on the Israel-Gaza War.” A notable exception: University of Florida President Ben Sasse.

Here’s what Mr. Sasse wrote Tuesday in an email addressed to “Jewish Gator Alums,” which deserves to be quoted at length:

“I will not tiptoe around this simple fact: What Hamas did is evil and there is no defense for terrorism. This shouldn’t be hard. Sadly, too many people in elite academia have been so weakened by their moral confusion that, when they see videos of raped women, hear of a beheaded baby, or learn of a grandmother murdered in her home, the first reaction of some is to ‘provide context’ and try to blame the raped women, beheaded baby, or the murdered grandmother. In other grotesque cases, they express simple support for the terrorists.

“This thinking isn’t just wrong, it’s sickening. It’s dehumanizing. It is beneath people called to educate our next generation of Americans. I am thankful to say I haven’t seen examples of that here at UF, either from our faculty or our student body. . . .

“In the coming days, it is possible that anti-Israel protests will come to UF’s campus. I have told our police chief and administration that this university always has two foundational commitments: We will protect our students and we will protect speech. This is always true: Our Constitution protects the rights of people to make abject idiots of themselves. . . .

“When evil raises its head, as it has in recent days, it is up to men and women of conscience and courage to draw strength from truth and commit ourselves to the work of building something better—to the work of pursuing justice and pursuing peace. That is what we aim to do through education, compassion, and truth here at the University of Florida.”

Christopher L. Eisgruber
Oct. 10, 2023

Even in a world wearied and torn by violence and hatred, Hamas’s murder and kidnapping of hundreds of Israelis over the past weekend is among the most atrocious of terrorist acts.  This cruel and inhumane attack has provoked a bloody war that has already claimed the lives of thousands of Palestinians and Israelis and will tragically take many more as it continues.

Princeton is a community that embraces many Israelis and Palestinians among its cherished members, as students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Even more have friends or relatives directly experiencing this awful violence.  The nightmare underway in Israel and in the Palestinian territories is being deeply felt on this campus.  That pain will inevitably continue in the months ahead.  My heart goes out to everyone personally affected.

Roger Ream
National Review

Excerpt: Once a place for the open exchange of ideas and honest debate, many U.S. college campuses no longer tolerate dissenting views expressed by students and professors.

This phenomenon, which has allowed dogma and ideology to supplant the search for truth, has taken root in college lecture halls, student governments, and campus newspapers. The trend has major implications for American life, as today’s students become tomorrow’s leaders. Its effects may be most clearly felt in a profession historically associated with reporting the facts and promoting diversity of opinion: American journalism. If unchecked, it will have both short- and long-term repercussions not just for future journalists but for the American experiment as a whole.

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley's Blog

Excerpt: We have been following the gradual elimination of common terms deemed offensive or microaggressive. The latest is the word “picnic.” After the University of Nevada Las Vegas law school’s Environmental Law Society announced a picnic, it was renamed “Lunch by the Lake” due to “diversity and inclusion” concerns.

The ELS was able to avoid a second correction with a “Lunch in the Field” since “field” has also been found to be offensive at other schools. According to a memo, the law group informed members that the word “picnic” has “historical and offensive connotations,” and apologized for “any harm or discomfort” caused by its use. That is consistent with the view of  the University of Michigan’s IT department in finding that “Picnic” was an offensive word.

Madison Ingram
Los Angeles Times

Excerpt: This year is on pace to set the record for the highest number of attempted book bans since the American Library Assn. began compiling data on library censorship more than 20 years ago. Last year, there were demands to censor more than 2,500 library books.

Librarians and other educators in those states are fighting to defend the public’s right to intellectual freedom, but libraries have always been on the front lines of the conflict between censorship and free speech in the U.S. since the first public libraries were established in the 19th century.

Adam Goldstein
Washington Examiner

Excerpt: There has always been illiberalism on campus — at least, that’s what critics looking to hand-wave away concerns about cancel culture in higher education claim. But the insight that illiberalism predates cancel culture is as useful as saying that fire predates gasoline: It is both correct and astonishingly naive.

At the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, we collect a great deal of data about the higher education system, and our findings should alarm everyone.

Mark Berkson
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: It has been almost one year since the classroom incident, and despite the damage to the university’s image, there has been no internal inquiry. Not a single administrator has issued an apology or taken responsibility. Instead, Hamline’s administration — after having had a long period to reflect on the media response, the AAUP report, and the statements of outraged faculty — organized “Academic Freedom and Cultural Perspectives: Challenges for Higher Ed Today and Tomorrow.”

Audie Cornish
The Assignment With Audie Cornish Podcast

Excerpt: Between student protests, controversial speakers, and debates over “safe spaces,” complaints about free speech on campus are louder than ever. How do school leaders respond to these gripes? And how do they balance freedom of expression – and the idea that speech can be violence?

We have two college presidents from the front lines of this debate: Roslyn Clark Artis of Benedict College and Michael Roth of Wesleyan University. Both schools are part of the so-called “Campus Call for Free Expression.”

Hannah Natanson
Washington Post

Excerpt: The American Library Association is facing a partisan firefight unlike anything in its almost 150-year history. The once-uncontroversial organization, which says it is the world’s largest and oldest library association and which provides funding, training and tools to most of the country’s 123,000 libraries, has become entangled in the education culture wars — the raging debates over what and how to teach about race, sex and gender — culminating in Tuesday’s Senatorial name-check.

James Huffman
National Association of Scholars

Excerpt: Academics from across the political spectrum have appropriately objected to some recently proposed laws as threats to academic freedom and thereby to higher education’s historic mission—the discovery and dissemination of knowledge. The principle of academic freedom has long stood as the guarantor of the free and open inquiry requisite to the academic pursuit of truth and is widely understood to allow for no exceptions.

But adherence to the principle does not preclude all limits on faculty conduct. Academic freedom does not require colleges and universities to tolerate bad teaching or incompetence. Nor should it protect professorial conduct that undermines open inquiry and pursuit of truth.

Jay Bhattacharya
The Free Press

Excerpt: My parents had taught me that people here could criticize the government, even over matters of life and death, without worry that the government would censor or suppress us. But over the past three years, I have been robbed of that conviction. American government officials, working in concert with big tech companies, have attacked and suppressed my speech and that of my colleagues for criticizing official pandemic policies—criticism that has been proven prescient.

The headline is a good one: the federal government can no longer threaten social media companies with destruction if they don’t censor on behalf of the government.

Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression and College Pulse
 
Excerpt: For the fourth year in a row, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonprofit organization committed to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought, and College Pulse surveyed college undergraduates about their perceptions and experiences regarding free speech on their campuses.

Last year, Princeton demonstrated a “below average” speech climate ranking #169 of 203. This year, Princeton ranked 187 of 248 and continued to maintain a “below average” rating.

George R. La Noue
National Association of Scholars

Excerpt: One of the most powerful influences in higher education today is the concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Managed by an ever-growing bureaucracy and promoting a seductive, though ambiguous, message to this generation of students, DEI continues to grow on campuses. It is estimated that almost one-fifth of all academic positions now require DEI statements to be submitted. In the 2021 UC Berkeley hiring season, 679 out of 893 candidates for life sciences positions were rejected for failing initial DEI metrics and did not have their academic credentials evaluated.

Who could object to these concepts? Seeing a billboard declaring, “Diversity is our strength” doesn’t really hurt anyone, does it? DEI advocates argue that no good person could support monocultures, inequality or exclusion, so the movement is just promoting “common good” ethics.

William Melhado
Texas Tribune
 
Excerpt: The political climate in Texas is the leading contributor to professors' desire to leave the state, a new survey of more than 1,900 Texas faculty members found. More than a quarter of those professors said they planned to look for positions elsewhere in the country this year as a result of political interference and widespread dissatisfaction with the state of higher education in Texas.

Of the professors surveyed, 57% cited the state’s political climate as their top reason for wanting to leave Texas. The second and third most cited reasons for a desire to leave were anxieties about salary and concerns over academic freedom, respectively.

Jeremy Young
Time Magazine
 
Excerpt: “Public universities,” Christopher Rufo wrote on August 11 on X (formerly Twitter), “are not a ‘free marketplace of ideas.’”

This provocative statement doesn’t fully convey Rufo’s views on the subject; he’s noted elsewhere that universities should be an “environment of open, substantive debate.” But as a trustee at New College of Florida, Rufo has demonstrated the limits of his tolerance for ideas that differ from his own.

Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe
Reason Magazine
 
Excerpt: California Community Colleges' new teaching standards "mandate viewpoint conformity" and "compel professors to teach and preach the State's perspective," according to a lawsuit called Palsgaard v. Christian, filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE.  

Join Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe this Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern for a discussion with Jessie Appleby, an attorney with FIRE, and Bill Blanken, the plaintiff and a chemistry professor at Reedley College in California, who says the standards advanced by the state's community college board amount to "compelled speech" in the classroom.

Professor Robert P. Gorge
National Review
 
Excerpt: As the new academic year begins, I have some advice for conservative and religiously observant students who are entering colleges and universities in which their beliefs will place them in the minority, and perhaps make them feel like “outsiders.”
You will encounter double standards. Don’t be quiet about them. Ask for them to be removed. If necessary, be assertive and persistent, though always respectful, relying on the force of argument and the power of reason. At Princeton, students and sympathetic faculty working together have had a fair amount of success over the years in getting rid of double standards, but we won’t stop until they are all gone.

You may experience prejudice, perhaps in grading, perhaps in other areas of your academic or social life on campus. If you do, try to find a friendly faculty member who can guide you and perhaps even advocate for you in addressing the injustice.

Editorial Board
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Excerpt: Incoming University of Pittsburgh chancellor Joan Gabel has set an encouraging tone early in her tenure by associating herself, and the university, with the Campus Call for Free Expression. The culture of fear and distrust that has come to dominate American political life can only be overcome by learning to speak one’s principles boldly and to listen to others generously.

That’s the vision of College Presidents for Civic Preparedness, a consortium Ms. Gabel has joined, alongside 14 other academic leaders from institutions such as Duke University, Cornell University and the University of Notre Dame.

PEN America Press Release

Excerpt: PEN America said today calls to remove a book from a Princeton University syllabus and fire a professor were “highly misguided” and ”unwarranted.” The book in question, slated for inclusion in a course called ”The Healing Humanities — Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South,” critiques the state of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians.

Jonathan Friedman, PEN America’s program director for Free Expression and Education, said: “If we scrubbed college campuses of any book that could cause any offense, we would be left with a fairly barren environment for academic inquiry. University education is meant to challenge minds and be a place for open exchange about global political issues, even when they are contested.”

John Wilson
Academe Blog

Excerpt: On August 14, the Cornell Free Speech Alliance (CFSA) issued a report, “Lifting The Fog: Restoring Academic Freedom & Free Expression At Cornell University,” that made policy recommendations for how Cornell can improve its climate for free speech. Keith Whittington at Reason called the report “a valuable agenda for faculty across the country.” Carl Neuss, the chair of the Cornell Free Speech Alliance board, declared that the “recommendations themselves sort of read like mom and apple pie—it’s hard to not agree with them,”

While it’s a thoughtful approach that includes some good ideas, the report also includes an alarming number of calls to suppress free expression. Sadly, it’s not all mom and apple pie.

Leon Sachs
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: We should think about campus speech debates the way my hometown political cartoonist, Joel Pett, suggested we think about climate change. Some years ago, Pett published a political cartoon satirizing climate change denial: a speaker onstage at a climate summit is explaining the many benefits of greener environmental policies. In the crowd, a defiant climate skeptic stands up and exclaims, “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?”

If we replace meteorology with the university, this cartoon captures today’s debates about campus speech climates. It also suggests a better way to think about them.

Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: A New College of Florida professor who was denied tenure by the Board of Trustees has filed a lawsuit—along with the United Faculty of Florida—against the board and the Florida Board of Governors, which oversees higher education in the state. The lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of a recent state law that limits arbitration, News Service of Florida reported.

Viera-Vargas, a professor of Caribbean/Latin American Studies and Music, appealed the tenure denial, but his appeal was reportedly shot down; Corcoran cited a state law passed earlier this year—SB 266—that limits arbitration of faculty grievances.

Graham Piro
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Excerpt: The University of California San Diego’s decision to charge a large number of students who allegedly disrupted a campus event in May – charges that have swept up students who say they weren’t even present at the event – raises significant concerns about the university’s fealty to its constitutional obligations.

Aaron Terr
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Vulgar. Lewd. Indecent. Hateful. Those are four types of speech the city of Arab, Alabama, bans from signs within its borders. But as FIRE explained in a letter to the city on Tuesday, they’re also four types of speech protected by the First Amendment.

Maya Bodnick
Slow Boring, Substack

Excerpt: Every year, hundreds of thousands of students around the U.S. participate in competitive debate. Most start competing at a young age (early high school or even middle school), eager to learn about politics. At its best, the activity teaches students how to think critically about the government and the trade-offs that policymakers face. They are assigned to argue for different positions that they may not agree with and engage with their peers’ diverse perspectives.

Instead of expanding students’ worldviews, debate has increasingly narrowed to become a microcosm of critical theory. These critical theory arguments, known as kritiks, are usually wielded by the negation side to criticize the fundamental assumptions of their affirmation side opponents.

Caroline Downey
National Review

Excerpt: In a scathing Monday letter to the governing body of the Arizona university system, the former events manager at Arizona State University’s auditorium, who was fired after booking Dennis Prager and other right-wing speakers, accused the school of conniving to censor speech and punish employees who stood in its way.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: This could be a long article if I summarized all the mishigass going on in the community college system of the state of California, but I’ll try to be brief and put the items in numbered form. The upshot is that the system has thrown its hat entirely in the DEI ring, making all faculty and staff pledge fealty not just to DEI, but to the extreme Ibram Kendi-an view of DEI. And if you don’t obey they’re rules for behaving as an “antiracist”, you could be demoted, fired, or denied tenure.

Aleks Phillips
Newsweek

Excerpt: Just over two years after Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a new law that restricted what can be taught in classrooms about race, gender and bias, a lawsuit brought by public school educators seeks to challenge its constitutionality.

In a filing brought by the Tennessee Education Association, a teachers' organization, along with five educators from the state on Tuesday, they said the ban placed vague restrictions on what teachers were allowed to reference—in an apparent violation of the Fourteenth Amendment—and which made the threat of disciplinary action greater due to its subjectivity.

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley Blog

Excerpt: We have often discussed the embrace of censorship by the left and many Democratic politicians, including President Joe Biden. However, the most distressing aspect of this trend has been the support of many in the media. That erosion of support for free speech was on display this week in a tweet from a New York Times’ reporter. Sheryl Gay Stolberg said that this week’s effort by Democrats to censor Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “raised thorny questions” about whether misinformation is protected speech.

There are no “thorny questions” over the censorship of this speech, because misinformation is unquestionably protected under the First Amendment.

Matt Reed
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: I read with interest the report on a new study from North Dakota State University on students’ hypothetical willingness to report professors who say “offensive” things.  

As a longtime administrator, I can count the number of student complaints about professorial speech on one hand and have fingers left over. It hasn’t happened with anything close to the frequency that the article indicates.