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Cary Nelson and Joe Lockard
Quillette
Excerpt: On 10 January 2025, Katherine Franke announced her departure from the Columbia University Law School. After she issued a public statement, she had it republished on the Academe blog of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
Two of Franke’s law-school colleagues had filed a complaint after Franke gave an interview to Democracy Now on 25 January 2024, in which she claimed that IDF veterans enrolled at Columbia had a history of harassing other students but that the university was not taking this harassment seriously. The complaint stated that Franke had “harassed members of the Columbia community based on their national origin.” An independent law-firm investigation found that she had violated university anti-discrimination policy.
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?
