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Patrick Jaojoco, Brandi Bushman, and Humza Gondal (and many undersigned)
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: We — the undersigned leaders, community members, and allies of cultural affinity groups of Princeton University — condemn in the strongest possible terms the University’s utter disregard for the safety and wellbeing of its students of color, the ongoing racist policing of students of color, and a total dismissal of the demands for divestment that our communities have made through peaceful demonstrations.

When Princeton’s endowment supports the state of Israel (and U.S. military action), which is committing a genocide that actively targets the families, friends, and communities of Palestinian students, it is clear that our safety is not on your list of priorities.

Khoa Sands
The Princeton Tory

Excerpt: Across the country, students are occupying university campuses and decrying their own schools. Chaos has unfolded at numerous universities. As authorities attempt to control the protest, criticism has mounted over perceived excessive force. The upcoming Democratic Party Convention in Chicago promises to be marked by radical demonstrations. The year was 1968.

Sean Stevens
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression released “The Judge Duncan Shoutdown: What Stanford Students Think.” This retrospective survey report combines data from a FIRE and College Pulse survey conducted last year after the shoutdown of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford University with an analysis of FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings survey data, which was administered before — and extended through the time of — the shoutdown.

Samuel J. Abrams
Minding the Campus

Excerpt: Closing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) offices around the country is a powerful step in halting the illiberal and divisive harm-centric monoculture that has taken over higher education. However, there remain far too many student-facing administrative offices that seek the same goals.

Whether in residential services or student life offices, administrators wield significant power and influence over students, affecting their learning and future trajectories. It’s crucial to address any dangerous or divisive behavior exhibited by these administrators.

Abigail Anthony
National Review

Excerpt: Columbia University president Minouche Shafik condemned the “intimidating and harassing behavior” that has occurred on the New York City campus over the past several days and announced that classes would be held remotely on Monday.

“Antisemitic language, like any other language that is used to hurt and frighten people, is unacceptable and appropriate action will be taken,” Shafik said in a statement. She further suggested that “tensions have been exploited and amplified by individuals who are not affiliated with Columbia who have come to campus to pursue their own agendas.”

Ava Johnson
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: I’m a first-year, and in less than a year, it’ll be time for me, my friends, and the Class of 2027 to join eating clubs. When we do, we’ll be looking for spaces where we can relax, socialize, and be among friends. We’re looking for places where we can have a reprieve from the fast pace of Princeton life, places where we can eat dinner, play pool, and sit around in complete comfort.

A few weeks ago, Matthew Wilson, a columnist and a member of the Charter Club wrote a column in the ‘Prince’ titled “We must not let eating clubs be ideological safe spaces.” This confused me — what is an eating club if not a safe space for its members? From the outside looking in, the clubs seem to be exactly that: a place for members to feel comfortable, relaxed, and safe.

Michelle N. Amponsah and Joyce E. Kim
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: Harvard filed a motion in federal court on Friday to dismiss a lawsuit filed by six Jewish students that alleged the University failed to address “severe and pervasive” antisemitism on campus.

The University’s 38-page memorandum in support of its motion to dismiss outlined the “tangible steps” Harvard’s administration has taken to investigate and tackle antisemitism on its campus, including the presidential task force on combating antisemitism that interim Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 established in January.

Greta Reich and George Porteous
Stanford Daily

Excerpt: Graduate School of Business (GSB) Dean Jonathan Levin ’94 is charting a new direction for the University. His appointment as Stanford’s next president on Thursday follows the resignation of Marc Tessier-Lavigne last July and the interim appointment of Richard Saller, amid widespread administrative turnover.

Some philosophies will hold true between the two presidents. Levin has previously expressed support for institutional neutrality on political issues, including at Faculty Senate meetings.

Bridget O’Neill
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The guest policy changed at Princeton’s sole selective sign-in eating club. Days later, it changed again. On March 26, Charter Club’s President announced a new guest policy in a club-wide group chat. Under the new policy, club members were required to inform the Club Manager and a student officer of guests they invite during meal hours who were not friends or family “for review.”

By April 2, the policy was reversed after an intervention from the club’s Graduate Board. In the seven days in between, debate over the policy rose from the club’s private GroupMe to the headlines of national right-wing publications. Club leadership maintains that the reversal was not due to national media scrutiny.

Matthew Wilson
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The eating clubs, like the University as a whole, must avoid becoming ideological echo chambers or so-called safe spaces where people go to avoid the risk of having their convictions or worldview challenged. Unfortunately, Charter’s new visitors policy — enacted to protect students from those whose ideas and mere existence they erroneously and ridiculously believe threaten their safety — does just the opposite. The new policy is intellectually indefensible and must be immediately revoked.

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.

Samuel J. Abrams
Washington Examiner

Excerpt: Higher education is in crisis. A week rarely passes without an incident on a college campus in which cancel culture manages to shut down a speaker or an event. And while this sad state of affairs on campuses is now too familiar, self-censorship has moved well beyond leafy quads, lecture halls, and student unions and into the mainstream.

Greg Lukianoff and Sean Stevens
The Eternally Radical Idea

Excerpt: Last week we demonstrated that deplatforming attempts involving students have exploded over the past decade, supporting one aspect of Sean and Jonathan Haidt’s “new dynamic” hypothesis — which states that college students have become more hostile toward free speech over the past decade than in previous generations.

But Sean and Haidt’s hypothesis was also about how students would increasingly target conservative expression for deplatforming, and a deep dive into FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database indicates that it’s true: Students did in fact target conservative expression more often over the past decade than they did in the preceding 16 years.

Robert P. George
Public Discourse, Witherspoon Institute

Excerpt: My friend and former student Yoram Hazony has argued in Public Discourse that it’s time for universities to abandon any commitment to “absolute free speech.” In light of rampant expressions of anti-Semitism on university campuses since the horrific Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023, Yoram thinks universities should forbid and punish the expression or advocacy of certain ideas or positions by students and faculty, and “suspend” or “terminate” those who, for example, advocate genocide.

Yoram suggests that I and others—especially my friend Jonathan Haidt—have been “reduced” to defending a “fundamentally wrongheaded” pro–free speech view. Here I will explain why I persist in believing that the research and teaching missions of nonsectarian colleges and universities, such as the one at which Yoram was a student and at which I teach, are best served by the most robust commitment to freedom of thought, inquiry, and expression.

Dara Horn
The Atlantic

Excerpt: By now, December’s congressional hearing about anti-Semitism at universities, during which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT all claimed that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their university’s policies only “depending on the context,” is already a well-worn meme. Surely there is nothing left to say about this higher-education train wreck, after the fallout brought down two of those university presidents and spawned a thousand op-eds—except that all of the punditry about diversity and free speech and criticism of Israel has extravagantly missed the point.

Ben Raab and Benjamin Hernandez
Yale Daily News

Excerpt: Over 100 faculty members now have their signatures displayed on a website for a new faculty group, Faculty for Yale, which “insist[s] on the primacy of teaching, learning and research as distinct from advocacy and activism.”

Among other measures, the group calls for “a thorough reassessment of administrative encroachment” and the promotion of diverse viewpoints. The group also calls for a more thorough description of free expression guidelines in the Faculty Handbook; Yale’s current guidelines are based on its 1974 Woodward Report. The group also wants Yale to implement a set of guidelines regarding donor influence, which were first put forth by the Gift Policy Review Committee in 2022.

Francesca Block, Princeton 2022, PFS Board Member
The Free Press

Excerpt: Free speech is the bedrock of a free society—essential for scientific progress, artistic expression, social justice, and democracy. But we live in an era in which free speech is seen as political. Where the very notion of hearing ideas from people you disagree with is viewed as suspect or even morally wrong.

Our campus culture today says it’s okay to shut down viewpoints you disagree with. There are the obvious ways this happens—through campaigns to disinvite controversial figures from campus or shout them down once they are there. But there are more subtle ways, too. There’s the unspoken, but very real, pressure in class to not question the information being presented, or to shy away from speaking up and offering a different perspective out of fear of being judged harshly by your peers.

Christie Davis
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt:  Student-led sociopolitical dissent is an enduring asset of the American university. Since the horrific events of Oct. 7, 2023, on-campus demonstrations have recognizably spiked.

Some even argue that Princeton University is responsible for answering inquiries on its positions regarding national and global events to continuously support marginalized voices. While this goal is undeniably noble, a reexamination of the Kalven Report and recent restrictive legislation levied towards Florida universities serves as a necessary reminder that we at Princeton shouldn’t overlook the power of institutional neutrality to preserve campus discussions of diversity and equity.

Yoram Hazony
Public Discourse, Witherspoon Institute

Excerpt: The fact that anti-Marxists like Haidt and George have been reduced to defending the “absolute free speech” point of view just shows how vapid the debate over the educational purpose and content of the universities has become. Do these venerable scholars really believe an educational institution can do its job while its faculty and students beat the drums for the extermination of anyone they please? Or are they just saying that because, in today’s universities, you can’t get away with arguing for anything other than more free speech?

Either way, this position is fundamentally wrongheaded and should be rejected. In fact, there is no reason the universities should permit faculty and students to call for genocide against the Jews—or anyone else.

Courtney Tanner
Salt Lake Tribune

University of Utah faculty vented their frustrations Monday over the state’s rollback of diversity efforts across public education — with one professor saying it’s “planting the flag of hatred” and another suggesting the school’s president should have done more to fight the legislation.

Abigail Anthony
National Review

Excerpt: Princeton University released its annual Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion report last week, touting the many DEI initiatives and programs implemented over the previous academic year, which include awarding “inclusive pedagogy grants,” hosting “faculty diversity salons,” and hiring a DEI librarian.

UNC Alumni Free Speech Alliance

Excerpt: Join UNC AFSA, the Student Free Speech Alliance, Heterodox Heels and the UNC Program for Public Discourse for an enlightening evening with renowned social psychologist and professor Jonathan Haidt. Dr. Haidt will discuss dynamics that are reshaping university campuses, explore America's dwindling trust in higher education, and offer suggestions as to what academic institutions must do to regain society’s confidence.

Emma H. Haidar and Cam E. Kettles
The Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: Interim University President Alan M. Garber ’76 pledged to tackle “pernicious” antisemitism on Harvard’s campus, saying he is most concerned about self-censorship in the face of anti-Israel attacks in an interview Wednesday — his first since assuming office on Jan. 2.

Garber did not answer repeated questions about whether his administration would consider instituting a speech code for Harvard classrooms. But in a follow-up statement, Garber wrote that he did not support speech codes.

Joe Killian
NC Newsline

Excerpt: The climate for free speech and expression on North Carolina’s college campuses is good and improving, according to a new report from the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The group, whose work is frequently cited by campus trustees and members of the UNC System Board of Governors, gave 14 of the system’s 16 university campuses its highest “green light” rating in its new report.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: Over 100 universities have adopted some version of the University of Chicago’s Principle of Free Expression, also called the “Chicago Statement”: a strong version of free speech, pretty much adhering to the First Amendment. But the same doesn’t hold for another mainstay of our free-speech program: the Kalven Principles. This is the principle of institutional neutrality

I want to note that another university has just joined the three having official institutional neutrality. And that is Columbia University

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is True

Excerpt: At many colleges, submitting SAT test scores for admissions has been eliminated or made optional—often during the pandemic—under the assumption that giving scores would disadvantage racial minorities, who don’t test as well as do white or Asian applicants. This was a way to achieve diversity—a way to enact “holistic admissions.”  Even though SAT scores were good predictors not only of college achievement, and of later-life success, measures of potential achievement were considered less important than indices of diversity.

Now the highly-rated Dartmouth College in New Hampshire has done a similar study, found the same correlative predication as did the UC system, and has reinstated the requirement for SATs, something it made optional during the pandemic.

Heterodox Academy Podcast
John Tomasi & Steven Pinker

Excerpt: Are our higher education institutions still nurturing true
intellectual diversity? Our guest today is Steven Pinker, a cognitive
scientist at Harvard, and today, we'll be exploring the growing
concerns within higher ed that institutions are turning into echo
chambers, stifling dissent and censoring certain perspectives.

In this thought-provoking episode, we'll be discovering the challenges
to academic freedom in the era of cancel culture. We'll explore how
questioning a consensus can now come at a cost, impacting the pursuit
of truth within academic institutions. We'll also uncover the story of
the Council for Academic Freedom at Harvard, which was formed to
combat these challenges.

Zach Kessel
National Review

Excerpt: Just days after Hamas's brutal terror attack on Israeli civilians, the Princeton University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine used a school-wide email listserv to send a statement excusing the rape and murder of innocent people to the inbox of every student on campus, in apparent violation of university policy.

Under Princeton policy, “mass electronic mailings are permitted only as authorized by appropriate University offices." Those same rules include a prohibition on distributing “malicious, harassing, or defamatory content through university channels.” A Princeton spokesman would not say whether SJP received permission to send the email from any university authority.

Keith E. Whittington
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Barnard College has become the site of the latest flare-up in an ongoing struggle between faculty and university leaders for the control of university communication platforms. On October 23, the department of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies posted a statement of solidarity: “We support the Palestinian people who have resisted settler colonial war, occupation, and apartheid for over 75 years, while deploring Hamas’s recent killing of Israeli civilians.”

Shortly afterward, the university removed the statement from the departmental website. The move was in pursuit of the university’s “website governance policy” (established in November, after the department’s initial statement), which specifies that all subdomains of barnard.edu Internet domain are property of the college. Barnard is hardly alone in debating such issues. Princeton University recently tabled a policy aimed at formalizing procedures for units of the university to issue political statements.

Christopher Eisgruber ‘83
Princeton University

Excerpt: Some people, however, have seized upon public outrage about antisemitism as a stalking horse for other agendas, including, most notably, attacks upon the efforts that we and others make to ensure that colleges and universities are places where students, faculty, researchers, and staff from all backgrounds can thrive.

Some of these arguments are nakedly partisan jeremiads, but others come from centrist voices. These attacks are wrong. America’s leading universities are more dedicated to scholarly excellence today than at any previous point in their history, and our commitment to inclusivity is essential to that excellence.

Suzanne Nossell
CNN

Excerpt:  In a matter of months, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — or DEI — has gone from a guiding light on US college campuses to a deprecated doctrine blamed for chilling speech and imposing groupthink in higher education.

DEI programs are not inherently censorious. On the contrary, an open marketplace of ideas requires that everyone be able and willing to speak up. If barriers including prejudice, stereotyping or intimidation inhibit certain students from joining in classroom discussions or extracurricular life, the vitality of the public square diminishes. Steps to eliminate those obstacles range from training professors to elicit broader in class participation, supporting students with weaker academic backgrounds, or fostering community among sometimes isolated minorities.

Joshua T. Katz
AEI

Excerpt: Do we really need another opinion piece about the resignation of Claudine Gay? The Harvard train wreck has transfixed the nation since early October, and even as the punditry piles up, the gulf seems to be widening between those who excoriate Gay, the Harvard Corporation, and the university generally and those who praise Gay as a martyr and defend the practices of the institution she led.

Few people, however, have said nice things about the Harvard Corporation, and one lesson to learn from the New York Times exposé into this secretive body’s quick, behind-the-scenes shift from expressing confidence in Gay’s presidency to pushing her out is that the public pressure of punditry can work.

Harry R. Lewis
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: Unapologetic antisemitism — whether the incidents are few or numerous — is a college phenomenon because of what we teach, and how our teachings are exploited by malign actors.

When complex social and political histories are oversimplified in our teachings as Manichaean struggles — between oppressed people and their oppressors, the powerless and the powerful, the just and the wicked — a veneer of academic respectability is applied to the ugly old stereotype of Jews as evil but deviously successful people. While Harvard cannot stop the abuse of our teaching, we, the Harvard faculty, can recognize and work to mitigate these impacts.

Jessie Appleby
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Excerpt: The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents announced in late December that it voted unanimously to terminate long-time chancellor of the UW-La Crosse campus, Joe Gow, after discovering his involvement in the adult film industry.

In short, while the First Amendment may indeed protect Gow’s continued employment as a faculty member with UW, the university will likely cite grounds for terminating his position as chancellor around the terms of his appointment and the high-ranking and public-facing nature of the position.

Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea

Excerpt: The biggest problem with smart people is that they’re incredibly good at using their prefrontal cortices to rationalize what they want to believe in the first place. This is a well-documented phenomenon, and one you can observe yourself right now. Are you inclined to agree with me here? If so, you’re already forming rationalizations about why I’m correct. If you’re inclined to disagree, you’re reading this with an eye for poking holes in everything I’m saying.

And with Claudine Gay’s recent resignation amid mounting accusations of plagiarism, boy, is that rationalizing happening.

James Hankins
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Claudine Gay, the president of my university, is under attack for academic dishonesty. She is charged with several instances of plagiarism, in her dissertation and other published work, in addition to data falsification. As of this writing it seems not unlikely that she may be fired or asked to resign.

What concerns me is that the public discussion so far hasn’t shown a sufficient appreciation of how serious academic honesty is in research institutions. Some of Ms. Gay’s supporters treat the allegations as trivial, dismissing them as the product of right-wing scandal-mongering. That is a historically uninformed view. Research universities, and the wider modern project of improving human life through research and scholarship, depend on academic honesty.

Keith E. Whittington
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: On December 12, I participated in a timely panel discussion at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study on "Free Speech, Political Speech, and Hate Speech on Campus." The panel included Jeannie Suk Gersen, Nadine Strossen, and Erica Chenoweth, and was moderated by Tomiko Brown-Nagin.

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.

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.

Steven Pinker
Boston Globe

Excerpt: For almost four centuries, Harvard University, my employer, has amassed a reputation as one of the country’s most eminent universities. But it has spent the past year divesting itself of tranches of this endowment.

In the wake of this debacle, the natural defense mechanism of a modern university is to expand the category of forbidden speech to include antisemitism (and as night follows day, Islamophobia). Bad idea. For universities to have a leg to stand on when they try to stand on principle, they must embark on a long-term plan to undo the damage they have inflicted on themselves. This requires five commitments.

Heather Mac Donald
City Journal

Excerpt: Liz Magill was forced to resign Saturday as president of the University of Pennsylvania—by all indications because, at a congressional hearing, she could not bring herself to declare that calls for the genocide of Jews are punishable speech. She would more justly have lost her job for being a bald-faced hypocrite when it comes to campus free expression. The future of higher education depends on which of these motives governs such decisions in the future.

The presidents’ refusal to declare hypothetical calls for the genocide of Jews punishable conduct has been portrayed as the greatest scandal of the hearing. It was not. The real scandal was the presidents’ duplicity in citing a “commitment to free expression” as the reason why they needed to give “wide berth to . . . views that are objectionable,” as Gay put it.

Kate Hidalgo Bellows
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: A University of Arizona faculty member who was penalized last week over classroom comments she and another instructor were recorded as making about the war in Gaza revealed new details about the controversy in a conversation with The Chronicle on Wednesday.

Rebecca Lopez, an assistant professor of practice in the College of Education, said she and her co-instructor, Rebecca Zapien, received letters last week informing them that they were being placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation.

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley’s blog

Excerpt: In “The Indispensable Right,” I discuss how academics are now leading an anti-free speech movement on campuses that challenges the centrality (or even the necessity) of free speech protections in higher education. The latest such argument appeared this month in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Two Arizona State University professors — Richard Amesbury and Catherine O’Donnell — wrote that free speech concerns yield too much to the “right wing” and that free speech should not be given the protection currently afforded by universities and colleges. Indeed, they argue that free speech may be harming higher education by fostering “unworthy” ideas.

Steven Lubet
The Hill

Excerpt: The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) quite rightly calls itself the “most prominent guardian of academic freedom” for faculty and students in the U.S. In a recent statement on the Israel-Hamas war, however, titled “Polarizing Times Demand Robust Academic Freedom” the AAUP displayed a distressing anti-Israel bias that sadly undermines its commitment to even-handed protection of free expression.

Ilya Shapiro
The Free Press

Excerpt: Even antisemites have the right to free speech, as Nadine Strossen and Pamela Paresky correctly wrote in The Free Press. Since the Hamas massacre of October 7, they have been taking full advantage of that right. Especially on college campuses.

I would put my free speech bona fides up against anyone. I’m also a lawyer and sometime law professor who recognizes that not all speech-related questions can be resolved by invoking the words First Amendment. Much of what we’ve witnessed on campuses over the past few weeks is not, in fact, speech, but conduct designed specifically to harass, intimidate, and terrorize Jews.

Jacob Katz '23, Leon Skornicki '06
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: As PAW has compellingly demonstrated in recent articles, Hamas’ barbarous attacks on Israeli citizens hit close to home for many Princetonians. But the attacks’ aftermath has reached us all. Skyrocketing antisemitism has reverberated around the globe, and sure enough, it made its way through Fitz Randolph Gate. Following two student-led pro-Intifada rallies, concerned students reached out to alumni about unchecked antisemitism on campus.

As alumni, we want current students to guide campus discourse. We had our turn, and now it is theirs. But as Princeton occupies a prominent place in both our personal identities and our national conversation, we have reason to make our voices heard when something is awry. And when exasperated students turn to us and other alumni for help, something is awry.

Hannah Meyers
National Review

Excerpt: New York has the world’s largest diasporic Jewish population, yet its public university system has a long-standing antisemitism problem so pronounced that it inspired both federal and statewide legislation this year. Last month it was reported that, following a City University of New York (CUNY) law-student commencement speech featuring an anti-Zionist blood-libel rant, future ceremonies will not include student speakers. And two weeks ago, Governor Kathy Hochul announced that, next spring, an independent reviewer will issue recommendations for antisemitism policy at CUNY.

Academic Freedom Alliance

Excerpt: Since the attack on civilians in Israel on October 7, 2023, American college campuses have been the scene of political rallies, protests, and political statements coming from differing perspectives. The Academic Freedom Alliance takes no position on the politics of the Middle East or attempts to adjudicate competing claims. The AFA does, however, have a substantial interest in how the discussion of those events is conducted and regulated on American college campuses. Universities are now under extraordinary
pressure to police the speech and beliefs of members of the campus community. It is
essential that universities resist the pressure to do so.