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Christa Dutton
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Pro-Palestinian protests at three colleges in the past several days led to more than 100 arrests for trespassing or destruction of property. Several students were also suspended for violating their college’s policies and protest restrictions.
The mass arrests at Columbia University, Swarthmore College, and the University of Washington may signal a shift in how college leaders are responding to protests, experts say. Since last spring’s widespread protests over the war in Gaza, college leaders have drawn fierce criticism for being too slow to dismantle disruptive encampments or call in police to arrest those violating the law. Now, they’re eager to show federal authorities that they’re serious about stopping antisemitism and unruly protests.
Jeff Yass
The Free Press
Excerpt: I am giving $100 million to the University of Austin because the feedback mechanisms of higher education are broken.
Almost every system that works, works because of feedback. Evolution works because helpful mutations survive while harmful ones die off. Democracy works because voters support effective leaders and remove ineffective ones. Markets work because prices tell producers when to ramp up or scale back. Science works because the data from an experiment tells the scientist how likely their hypothesis is to be false.
Graham Piro
FIRE
Excerpt: FIRE has previously argued for colleges and universities to adopt institutional neutrality, both as a boon for the campus climate and as an insurance policy for the university. By declaring itself neutral on major political and social issues, a university ensures that it does not chill potential dissenters on campus by constantly taking official positions on unresolved topics.
But recently, two public universities demonstrated that they misunderstand what institutional neutrality entails. They used the principle to restrict student speech under the guise of protecting university neutrality.
Adam Goldstein
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: A recent essay in these pages by Charles F. Walker posits that the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s rankings don’t actually measure the speech climate of college campuses because they penalize colleges for disruptive speech that is constitutionally protected. Walker’s argument is rooted in a number of misconceptions, not the least of which is that he seems not to understand what the rankings are for. Moreover, he misrepresents the law around disruptive protests. But because the first problem swallows the second, let’s start there.
