Sarah Viren
New York Times
Excerpt: In January 2024, Maura Finkelstein finished teaching her first classes of the semester, unaware they would be her last as a professor. This was on a Wednesday at Muhlenberg College, a campus stippled with red doors meant to represent both hospitality and the college’s Lutheran roots.
It made sense. For months, students, alumni and strangers had been complaining about Finkelstein. They started a Change.org petition the previous fall, demanding that she be fired for “dangerous pro-Hamas rhetoric” and “blatant classroom bias against Jewish students.” As evidence, the petition, and its 8,000 signers, had offered up screenshots of Finkelstein’s posts: a photo of her, on Oct. 12, in a kaffiyeh, a kaffiyeh-patterned face mask and a tank top that read “Anti-Zionist Vibes Only.”
Comments will be approved before showing up.
Violating the First Amendment will cost you. Universities and other public institutions are learning this lesson the hard way as the dust settles on a series of lawsuits brought by university faculty and staff who were punished for their comments about Charlie Kirk’s murder last September.
If Johns Hopkins University wanted to signal its seriousness about creating an alternative to the left-leaning orthodoxy that permeates higher education, it couldn’t have done better than the recent hire of economist Peter Arcidiacono.
House Republicans have now formally backed President Donald Trump in fulfilling his campaign promise to dismantle the Department of Education, voting Wednesday to advance 10 bills that would codify the White House’s efforts to disperse numerous education programs and offices to other federal agencies.