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Gal Beckerman
The Atlantic
On Thursday morning, PEN America, the free-speech organization, posted an article detailing the “isolation and exclusion” many Israeli and Jewish writers have felt since October 7, 2023. The authors describe being blacklisted at publishing houses, boycotted by activists, pressured to downplay their Jewishness, and called out in online witch hunts including a viral crowdsourced spreadsheet that asked: “Is your fav writer a Zionist???”
Drawing attention to such suppression would seem to fall squarely within the mandate of this watchdog group, whose motto is “the freedom to write.” And yet, publication of the article—which makes no policy recommendations and is written in a mournful, rather than accusatory, tone—was enough to make PEN America’s president, the novelist Dinaw Mengestu, decide to resign in protest within hours.
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There is an important lawsuit being litigated in the Southern District of New York over the limits of free speech and academic freedom for faculty at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Professor Tim Bakken, West Point’s longest-serving civilian law professor, is challenging new Trump Administration regulations that allegedly constitute unconstitutional prior restraints on academic publications and limit academic freedom and free speech.
The Report, and the follow-up disciplinary reports now being issued, raise uncomfortable questions for professors and for university leaders alike. Are there limits to professors’ freedom to conduct research and teach courses however they think best? Do university leaders dare intervene if scholarship becomes excessively politicized?
The Education Department is asking university leaders to publicly commit to a series of institutional changes, many of which are in line with the Trump administration’s higher education agenda, by the end of the year.
