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Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression
Excerpt: If America’s colleges could earn report cards for free speech friendliness, most would deserve an “F”— and conservative students are increasingly joining their liberal peers in supporting censorship.
Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: College students—particularly those who identify as conservative—are less likely to tolerate controversial speech than they were last year, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual survey.
For the 2026 edition of its free speech rankings, FIRE surveyed over 68,000 students from 257 colleges and universities in the U.S. In a question about six hypothetical speakers—three with what are widely considered conservative views and three with traditionally liberal beliefs—the share of students who said the speakers should be allowed to speak on campus dropped by at least five percentage points in all six cases.
The Crimson Editorial Board
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: This summer, Harvard College swapped the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion for the language of “culture and community,” closing the Harvard College Women’s Center and BGLTQ spaces, only vaguely promising to keep services unchanged. DEI might have failed at Harvard, but without increased transparency, the cautiously-worded rebrand will suffer a similar fate.
Now, the rage at the College is “viewpoint diversity,” exemplified in its Intellectual Vitality initiative and DEI rebrand. We agree with the premise: the academic mission requires engaging with diverse perspectives. But as Harvard’s institutional emphasis on diversity shifts to the intellectual, students from backgrounds affected by the DEI purge may find themselves unsupported.
Jeannie Suk Gersen
New Yorker
Excerpt: Last time U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs sided with Harvard in a case about the university’s alleged discrimination, it ended with the Supreme Court declaring race-conscious admissions unlawful at schools across the country. Harvard won its battle in the lower court on the way to losing the broader war.
On Wednesday, Judge Burroughs gave Harvard a win that vindicated broad principles at stake for universities and the rule of law. But the victory will not end Harvard’s pain, and it remains to be seen whether higher education can triumph in the end.
Yascha Mounk
Persuasion
Excerpt: As recently as a decade ago, a big bipartisan majority of Americans said that they have a lot of trust in higher education. Now, the number is down to about one in three.
To change the massive shift in public perception of academia, it would, it seems to me, be necessary to take radical steps to change its current nature. And so I want to make a modest proposal for how universities can refocus on their core mission of teaching and research—and become both much more affordable, and much more deeply embedded in the fabric of American society, in the process.
Emma Whitford
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: As of last week, faculty at Ohio State University can no longer make land acknowledgments—verbal or written statements that recognize the Indigenous people who originally lived on the university’s land—unless it is directly relevant to class subject matter.
The new policy from the university’s Office of University Compliance and Integrity is one of many created in response to Ohio’s SB 1, a sweeping higher education law passed in March that seeks to eliminate DEI offices and scrub all mentions of diversity, equity and inclusion from university scholarships, job descriptions and more.
