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Ilya Shapiro
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason 

Excerpt: As I wrote on Monday in my introduction to Lawless, the crisis in higher-ed is different than the decades-old complaint about the liberal takeover of the academy. Instead, university officials placate, facilitate, and even foment illiberal mobs, with everyone else keeping their heads down to avoid the cancellation crossfire. And that's a story of growing bureaucracies.

In the 25 years ending in 2012, the number of professional university employees who don't teach grew at about twice the rate of students, while tuition at public colleges more than tripled. Those trends have only accelerated, though useful statistics are hard to come by as surveyors change methodologies and the government fails to collect or disclose uniform data.

Olivia Sanchez and Annie Rupertus
Daily Princetonian 

Excerpt: In interviews with the ‘Prince,’ six students subject to University disciplinary proceedings described a tangled process that appeared fixated on searching for protest leaders to blame and employed tactics they described as invasive. The students were all investigated for supposed participation in pro-Palestine disruptions last spring. 

Their accounts, corroborated by dozens of documents reviewed by the ‘Prince,’ including emails and investigation records, provide a rare glance behind the scenes of the University’s investigative apparatus.

Khoa Sands
Princetonians for Free Speech Original Content

National attention on campus free-speech issues tends to focus on only the most sensational threats. Incidents like speaker shout-downs,disruptive protests,physical attacks,major petitions, orunjust firings garner the most attention from alumni and the general public. And rightly so – there is no shortage of incidents that ought to cause outrage from those who believe in academic freedom and free expression. However, there are subtler threats to free speech in the university that fly under the radar, ignored by the press, alumni, and students, but are no less insidious. They can be as subtle as a state of mind.

Sophia Vitter
College Fix

Excerpt: The University of Virginia “has willfully ignored its longstanding antisemitism problem” and must address it now, according to the Jefferson Council, an alumni network dedicated to preserving Thomas Jefferson’s legacy at the venerable university.

The alumni group recently published a 13-page report authored by council President Joel Gardner that argues antisemitism has been “exponentially exacerbated” on campus over the last year, following the massacre of Israeli citizens by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2024.

Abigail Rabieh 
Daily Princetonian 

Excerpt: It’s been my belief that going outside of Princeton to complain about Princeton’s functioning is always wrong. The benefit of a small community is precisely its opportunity to voice your beliefs in an open forum, one that is easy to access and easy to get responses. It is not hard to publish a letter in the ‘Prince,’ and the entire undergraduate community can be accessed via an email listserv. This, of course, guarantees no changes — I know well that the University is not accountable to its constituents. But that’s just the nature of the University: it’s a place where you subordinate yourself to receive an education. 

It seems I’ve been playing by outdated rules, however, because this is not how most people interact with Princeton.

Colleen Flaherty
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: A new Student Voice flash survey on campus speech issues from Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab finds that students most blame other students (versus other groups) for escalating tensions over campus speech. Politicians aren’t off the hook, though, coming in at a close second. At the same time, just one in 10 students is very concerned about the climate for campus speech at their institution; another three in 10 are somewhat concerned. A bigger share of students say they’re concerned to some degree about the climate for speech across higher education, however.

Jonathan Chait
The Atlantic

Excerpt: A decade ago, cultural norms in elite American institutions took a sharply illiberal turn. Professors would get disciplined, journalists fired, ordinary people harassed by social-media mobs, over some decontextualized phrase or weaponized misunderstanding. Every so often, I would write about these events or the debates that they set off.

But I haven’t written about this phenomenon in a long time, and I recently realized why: because it isn’t happening any more. Left-wing outrage mobs might still form here or there, but liberal America has built up enough antibodies that they no longer have much effect. My old articles now feel like dispatches from a distant era.

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.

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.

Bridget O'Neill and Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 appeared on C-SPAN on Wednesday for a 30-minute segment as part of his role as the newly-elected chair for the board of the Association of American Universities (AAU), a group representing 70 top research universities.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Eisgruber discussed the state of higher education, sharing his views on the boycott, divest, sanction (BDS) movement, the price of college, and the function of financial aid.

William Deresiewicz
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions — as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate — have been rejected. This was already evident before November 5. It can now no longer be denied.

The Eternally Radical Idea
Greg Lukianoff

Excerpt: One of the great disappointments of my professional life has been watching the decline of the American Association of University Professors, formerly the gold standard for defense of academic freedom on campus. Of course, there have always been and still are good, principled AAUP members and chapters out there. But since the beginning of my career back in 2001, the national AAUP have gone from being principled (if slow and plodding) defenders of academic freedom to increasingly partisan critics of freedom of speech and the First Amendment — taking institutional positions that directly threaten academic freedom.

And then a small group of college administrators decided to blow it all up.

Joan W. Scott
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The vice president of campus advocacy of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Alex Morey, has recently launched an unprecedented attack on the American Association of University Professors. She was quoted in Inside Higher Ed on Nov. 8 effectively offering an obituary for the organization in response to AAUP president Todd Wolfson’s expression of “disappointment” at the election of Donald Trump: “Faculty who’ve long relied on the AAUP for its principled academic freedom advice should look elsewhere,” Morey said.

Bridget O’Neill and Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The Council of the Princeton University Committee (CPUC) met on Monday, Nov. 11, for its second meeting of the academic year. The University's endowment came under particular scrutiny, as the group discussed divestment from Israel and fossil fuel dissociation. The state of dialogue among students in the wake of the US presidential election marked another of the meeting’s major talking points.

Cynthia Torres
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Following the Clio Hall sit-in that ended in 13 student arrests, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 sent a campus-wide email stating that the University was “exploring offering students arrested for protest-related offenses the option to participate in a ‘restorative justice’ process.”

However, according to an email chain obtained by The Daily Princetonian, this process quickly collapsed.

Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: House Republicans lambasted private elite colleges and some state flagship universities for how they’ve handled pro-Palestinian protests in a new report in which they argue that antisemitism has engulfed college campuses and administrators prioritized “terrorist sympathizers” over the Jewish community.

In the scathing 325-page report released Thursday, Republicans on House Education and Workforce Committee detailed the findings of their yearlong investigation into antisemitism at 11 colleges. Most of the findings reiterated many of the same points they’ve been making publicly since Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Sophia Wotman and Sam Levine
The Brown Daily Herald

Excerpt: The University temporarily suspended Brown’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine pending an external investigation into conduct violations at a pro-divestment protest held earlier this month.

“Given the severity of alleged threatening, intimidating and harassing actions during an event on campus, Brown University has initiated a review of the event and required the Brown chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine to cease all organization activities pending full review of the matter,” University Spokesperson Brian Clark told The Herald.

Stuart Taylor Jr. & Edward Yingling
National Review

Excerpt: Princeton University is tiptoeing toward canceling its greatest president and a founder of our nation in a process that its trustees and president Christopher Eisgruber accelerated on October 2 by announcing that they would leave the statue of John Witherspoon in its prominent place on Firestone Plaza — but probably only for now. The issue has been punted to the “Campus Art Steering Committee” to decide whether the statue should be moved, or removed.

Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier has emerged as a strong advocate for institutional neutrality in recent years, arguing that institutions often go beyond their core mission when they strike stances on public issues. He expounded on those views in an interview with Inside Higher Ed in which he discussed the growing number of institutions that have adopted institutional neutrality and how tensions in the Middle East and related protests on campuses are driving university leaders to rethink how they engage on contentious issues at home and abroad.

John Mark Rozendaal
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: It was a beautiful, rainy morning in August. I began to play a soulful slow dance by J.S. Bach on a $200 cello in front of Citibank’s international headquarters. Shielded by rainbow colored umbrellas, I was encircled by 12 brave cellist protectors with linked arms, dozens of fellow climate activists, and scores of New York’s “finest” deployed in riot gear.

Joseph De Avila
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Amy Wax, the Ivy League law professor suspended for making racist, sexist and inflammatory comments, stands to lose half a million dollars from her punishment.

Wax said she doesn’t regret the remarks that led to her reprimand. She is considering taking legal action, she said.

Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Pro-Palestinian protest activity has declined on college campuses this semester, at least compared to the tumultuous events of last spring.

But several of the demonstrations that resulted in student sanctions this fall have taken place at university career fairs, where activists gathered to protest weapons manufacturers and other companies with ties to the Israeli government or military. Many are the same companies that pro-Palestinian student protesters have demanded their universities divest from over the past year, albeit with little success.

Jerry A. Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: Bill Ackman is the billionaire hedge-fund manager who not only publicized the drop of donations to Harvard because of its purported antisemitism, but also helped bring down President Claudine Gay. But he’s also a double Harvard alum.

Apparently Ackman gave an invited talk about the Harvard Corporation, couched in financial jargon. There are 49 slides, and they pretty much encompass his thesis, which is that Harvard has become a business aimed not at providing a quality education to students, but to enriching the Corporation, and its mission has changed from promoting learning to pushing a “progressive” ideology.  In the process, it’s become woke and bloated with administrators.  But Ackman does seem some glimmers of hope on the horizon.

Amanda Friedman
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Princeton University was publicly celebrating a professor’s selection for a prestigious award at the same time it was investigating her for her pro-Palestinian advocacy, the professor says.

On Tuesday, Princeton announced that Ruha Benjamin, a professor of African American Studies, was awarded an $800,000 “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Roughly 20 minutes after the university published its celebratory announcement, Benjamin shared on X that university officials had omitted her quotes about an investigation the college had opened into her involvement in a pro-Palestinian demonstration in April. The thread also includes the quotes she gave to the university.

Alex Norbrook and Eleanor Clemans-Cope
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: On Oct. 3, Princeton gutted its landmark policy on fossil fuel dissociation, which once barred certain fossil fuel companies from funding University research and is now weakened to the point of irrelevance. This is a profoundly troubling decision that undermines the fight against climate change. In this action, Princeton has chosen to align itself with the industry most responsible for driving the climate crisis.

Ava Johnson
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: I never thought that the use of one three letter word could change my outlook on academia — and the world. But in one of the first lectures I attended at Princeton, my Politics professor referred to a hypothetical person as “she,” and my world turned upside down.

This year’s faculty diversity report goes to show that the importance of experiences like mine — having your worldview expanded by a professor with a historically disenfranchised perspective — is not fully being taken into account within Princeton’s hiring and tenure-track processes. In order to serve all students in the way that this professor was able to inspire me, Princeton must prioritize diversity in new tenure-track faculty hiring.

Emma Camp
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: The University of Maryland is now facing a lawsuit after unilaterally canceling all student expressive activities planned for October 7. The move came after the university received "numerous calls" expressing outrage over events organized by campus pro-Palestine groups to mark the anniversary of Hamas' massacre of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians last year.

Pamela Paul
New York Times

Excerpt: Last week Jonathan Holloway, the president of Rutgers University, announced he would be stepping down at the end of this academic year — the latest in a series of university president departures.

Given the widespread discord and protests on campuses, the past academic year was tough for any college president. But unlike others who left their posts, like Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay of Harvard, Holloway isn’t leaving the kind of elite institution that tends to attract outraged headlines and ire. Nor was he resigning in a heated moment of backlash or scandal. So why did he do it?

Susan H. Greenberg
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Protesters at the UC Berkeley School of Law disrupted a talk by an Israeli lawmaker last week, forcing him to deliver remarks remotely via Zoom, SFGATE reported.

The law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society had invited Simcha Rothman, a far-right member of Israel’s Parliament, to speak at an event Tuesday titled Restoring Democracy: The Debate Over Judicial Reform in Israel. Rothman is a key proponent of a controversial bill to give the Knesset more oversight of Israel’s judicial system.

Alan Singer
Academe Blog

Excerpt: In times of crisis, academics must be public intellectuals. Why invest our lives in becoming experts in history, society, policy, science, or any other field of study and then remain isolated in an academic cocoon for safety or career advancement? The consequences of silence for our profession and our society are too great.

Sadly, because of the power of money in American politics and in higher education, in a very real sense, only academics as public intellectuals remain in a position to respond to concerted silencing. But know when you speak, whether in the classroom or in a public forum, there will be consequences.

William Harris
FIRE

Excerpt: FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings show that roughly a quarter of students think it is not clear that their administration protects free speech on campus. And if a free speech controversy were to erupt? More than a quarter believe their administration would be unlikely to defend a speaker’s right to express their views.

America's colleges and universities should be bastions of free speech. Yet, these abysmal scores show they are not. Alumni don’t have to reward universities that flunk out on free speech: They can donate to FIRE in lieu of making a gift to their alma mater.

Ashleigh Fields
The Hill

Excerpt: Americans are placing less value on the First Amendment than they did four years ago, according to a new survey. A Freedom Forum report showed 58 percent of people say they would approve the First Amendment today, a 4-point drop from 2020.

Despite the decrease in importance, respondents said the right to free speech will influence their vote this fall. More than half of Americans in the Northeast said the First Amendment is relevant to their decision this fall, compared to 49 percent in the Midwest.

Laura Spitalniak
Higher Ed Dive

Excerpt: The University of California system, like many higher ed institutions, has struggled to balance free speech with campus safety as student protests over the Israel-Hamas war proliferated during the spring semester.

The system — home to about 296,000 students across 10 campuses — drew criticism over the violence that broke out during demonstrations and how administrators responded to protests. In the unfair labor practice charge, the associations accused the system of conducting “a relentless campaign” to stop faculty from teaching about the war “in a way that does not align with the University’s own position.″

John Bitzen
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: With the start of the academic year, campuses across the nation are preparing for more protests over the Israel-Hamas conflict. As students return to campus, the underlying issues that ignited these demonstrations—misunderstandings and misapplications of free speech—remain unaddressed. These protests have revealed a pressing challenge for universities: upholding the principles of free speech amid modern political activism.university-sponsored on that date.

Eugene Volokh
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Next week, the entire en banc Fifth Circuit will be hearing Little v. Llano County, a case involving allegations of viewpoint-based book removals in a public library. As I've noted before, the Supreme Court has never resolved whether such removals are unconstitutional. Pico v. Bd. of Ed. (1982), which considered the matter as to public school libraries, split 4-4 on the subject, with the ninth Justice, Justice White, expressly declining to resolve the substantive question.

I'm not sure what the answer here should be. I tentatively think a public school is entitled to decide which viewpoints to promote through its own library: School authorities can decide that their library will be a place where they provide books they recommend as particularly interesting/useful/enlightening/etc., essentially as supplements to the school curriculum (over which the school has broad authority).

Liam Knox
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Selective colleges began unveiling demographic data for the Class of 2028, the first admitted after the 2023 affirmative action ban, just a few weeks ago, and already legal threats are flying.

Students for Fair Admissions, whose lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina led the Supreme Court to strike down race-conscious admissions last June, wrote letters on Tuesday to the general counsels of Yale, Princeton and Duke Universities asking for details about their admissions processes, accusing them of noncompliance with the ruling. In the letters, obtained by Inside Higher Ed, SFFA president Ed Blum said he was “deeply concerned” that the institutions had violated the affirmative action ban.

Jorge Reyes
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: As Gaza solidarity encampments sprung up across university campuses last spring, students faced severe institutional repercussions for their activism. At Princeton, at least two students had their diplomas withheld and 15 were arrested. Across the country, over 3,000 students were arrested for participation in Gaza solidarity protests.

For some, these consequences are disproportionately dire. Undocumented and international students run the risk of being deported if arrested and are limited in their ability to protest, especially with politicians like Donald Trump threatening to infringe on their freedom of assembly.

Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The Department of Public Safety (PSAFE) is investigating small flyers found on campus reading “Nuke Gaza” and “Kill Roaches” as a bias incident, the University told The Daily Princetonian on Friday.

The pile of approximately 30 paper cutouts was first discovered by a fourth-year graduate student around noon on Friday outside entryway six of Spelman Hall. The individual gathered up the flyers and called PSAFE. Princeton’s daily crime log shows that PSAFE officers responded to the incident shortly after the call, and logged the interaction as a “harrassment/bias incident.” According to the graduate student, PSAFE collected the flyers from them at the scene.

Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Last spring, many of the students protesting the war between Israel and Hamas demanded that their universities divest from weapons manufacturers and other companies profiting off the bloodshed in Gaza. Some called for total divestment from Israel, accusing college leaders of being complicit in a genocide as the death toll of Palestinian civilians continued to climb.

Multiple universities agreed to weigh the divestment demands—among other concessions—often in exchange for students dismantling encampments. So far, few have actually moved to divest; some boards are still weighing the option while others have voted against it. But a handful of institutions have vowed to disclose their holdings, and some, such as San Francisco State University, have agreed to re-evaluate their investment screening processes.

Christopher Bao and Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Following the first day of classes, pro-Palestine organizers held the first protest of the academic year. Around 150 demonstrators attended, touring many of the major sites of Princeton’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” from the spring semester, starting the march on McCosh Courtyard before moving to the front of Clio Hall and Nassau Hall.

The protest comes amid a newly launched University website on protests addressing frequently asked questions regarding time, place, and manner restrictions, including tightened protest regulations. The newest rules introduced were a recurring topic of the protest, although administrators have asserted that the website introduces no significant changes to the University’s rules.

George Porteous
Stanford Daily

Excerpt: In his first interview with The Daily since taking office as Stanford’s 13th president on Aug. 1, Jonathan Levin ’94 shared his top priorities and perspective on major issues facing the University, from policies regarding protests and free speech to labor negotiations.

Matthew Kuchem
The Dispatch

Excerpt: Even though many academics and commentators have explored why higher education has gone off track—and how reformers might course-correct—it is worth stepping back to notice how today’s campus disputes are just one more theater in the culture wars. The intolerance and mutual antipathy of ideological opponents on both the left and the right undermine two of the most important rights and institutions in our liberal democracy: freedom of speech and universities.

It is therefore worth thinking carefully about how culture wars corrode liberalism and sabotage civil discourse, and to consider ways to stop them from wreaking more havoc on campus.

Jamie Saxon
Princeton Office of Communications

Excerpt: In his third year leading an Orientation session on academic freedom and free expression, President Christopher L. Eisgruber encouraged transfer and first-year students to make the most of the “transformative” opportunity they’ll have at Princeton to meet and learn from others with whom they disagree.

Niall Ferguson and Jacob Howland
The Atlantic

Excerpt: You’re in. You’ve been admitted. And soon your parents will drop you off at your new university. It’s thrilling. It’s daunting. But what will you actually be studying in your freshman year?

All universities claim to provide some kind of intellectual foundation for their students. Sadly, the reality of what freshmen and sophomores are required to study usually belies the admissions-office propaganda.

Featured
Ron Krebs and Cary Nelson
Petition

On Friday, August 9, 2024, the American Association of University Professors, which has long eloquently defended the core principle of academic freedom, reversed course and declared academic boycotts legitimate.

We believe the AAUP’s new position is wrong-headed and dangerous. We cannot safeguard academic freedom by violating academic freedom. Normalizing academic boycotts poses a profound threat to academic freedom.

Richard K. Vedder
Independent Institute

Excerpt: For learning and discovery communities to flourish, there has to be a diversity of ideas that are explored and debated, with multiple perspectives discussed civilly by veteran scholars—the faculty—as well as inquisitive young learners—the students. While campuses in recent years have obsessed over what are intellectually relatively unimportant dimensions of diversity, such as the skin color of participants in the scholarly enterprise, they increasingly have imposed a leftist monopoly on the exploration of ideas on many campuses, including the nation’s most prestigious ones. A progressive agenda reigns, and questioning it is increasingly rare as woke leaders impose their ideas on the campus community.

Virginia King
The College Fix

Excerpt: An open letter that opposes the American Association of University Professors’ new position to support academic boycotts quickly gained over 1,000 signatures from scholars and faculty upset by the recent decision.