Dylynn Lasky Bobby Ramkissoon
FIRE
Excerpt: After the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, universities faced a dilemma that has become grimly familiar in the age of social media: what to do when a member of the campus community says something online that others find intolerable.
Within days, institutions moved with visible urgency. Some suspended employees. Others terminated them outright. A few launched “investigations” whose conclusions seemed preordained. The message these colleges sent was unmistakable: offensive speech is not merely offensive, it is an assault on human dignity itself. And that, in the eyes of administrators, makes it punishable.
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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.