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Dominic Coletti
FIRE
Duke’s fight against the Trump administration has a new front: employee speech. After the White House accused the school of maintaining unlawful racial preferences and cut millions of dollars in research funding as punishment, the University ordered its employees to keep silent.
In late August, Jenny Edmonds, Sanford School of Public Policy’s associate dean of communications and marketing, emailed faculty members that all requests about “Duke and current events” must go through the University’s PR office. She cited increased scrutiny on universities and their policies and admonished faculty to stay in their lanes, discussing only their research with the media. While Edmonds’s message was limited to the public policy school, faculty across the university got similar messages.
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I recently listened to Ross Douthat’s interview with the philosopher Jennifer Frey. She is a serious thinker and an unusually courageous academic entrepreneur. What she built at the University of Tulsa before it was dismantled is exactly the sort of thing more universities should be attempting. Yet almost every argument she offered for the humanities is, I think, completely unpersuasive to anyone not already on our side of the table.
This report presents findings from a national survey of 1,959 law school faculty at 192 American Bar Association (ABA) approved law schools in the United States, conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). As one of the largest surveys of law faculty on free expression and professional norms, the data reveal a profession that strongly endorses free speech principles while struggling to live them out in practice.
I just returned from the University of Wyoming, where I debated the President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Todd Wolfson over the need for colleges and universities to maintain institutional neutrality. The debate was organized by the Steamboat Institute and was live-streamed.
The formal question presented for debate was: “Is institutional neutrality necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry rather than an actor in political disputes?” I spoke in favor of institutional neutrality while Wolfson argued against it as a necessary component to higher education.
