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Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea
Excerpt: As regular ERI readers and followers of FIRE will know, I’ve been defending free speech on campus since 2001 — nearly all of FIRE’s 25-year history. In 2022, FIRE expanded its mission, going from being the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. This was in no small part because we grew more and more concerned that the free speech crises we were dealing with on campus could and would spill over to other areas of our country.
I am speaking about bias reporting systems, sometimes called bias response teams, which are essentially snitch hotlines where people can report others for “offensive” or “hateful” speech. The act of doing this to your fellow Americans over protected speech would be bad enough, but these systems go further. They often consist not only of administrators, but also law enforcement.
Graham Parsons, professor philosophy at the USMA at West Point
New York Times
Excerpt: It turned out to be easy to undermine West Point. All it took was an executive order from President Trump and a memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dictating what could and couldn’t be taught in the military and its educational institutions.
Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: The Department of Education’s demands that University of Pennsylvania “restore” swimming awards and honors that had been “misappropriated” to trans women athletes and apologize to the cisgender women who had lost to them offer a glimpse into how the second Trump administration could use Title IX to force certain changes at colleges, experts and attorneys say.
Lee Jussim and Robert Maranto
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Now, thanks to the Trump administration’s—in our view questionable—policies regarding academia in general and elite institutions like Columbia and Harvard Universities in particular, policies that many plausibly view as political vengeance for leftist activism, higher education is rapidly approaching fear equity: The presidential right has joined the campus left in using intimidation to punish those whose speech they dislike. Now, everybody in academia gets to be afraid of being canceled, or at least having their grants canceled.
Is it possible that the new fear equity, with both left and right afraid to speak their minds, may be a necessary precondition to pave the way for a free speech renaissance?
