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Stephanie Lundquist Arora
Washington Examiner
Excerpt: Fairfax County’s school district updated its code of conduct this year to include a “required culturally responsive, learning intervention” for students with first-time “hate speech” infractions. In Fairfax County, hate speech is defined in the broadest sense possible to include “misgendering.”
Fairfax County Public Schools has a history of compelling speech, arguably violating the First Amendment. In the last year, the 12 Democrat-endorsed school board members have made “ misgendering ” and “deadnaming” offenses punishable with suspensions for students as young as 5. It has also implemented a bias incident reporting system , which restricts free speech and is being challenged in courts nationwide
Igor Mazin
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Ages ago, in the 1970s Soviet Union, a Jewish stand-up comedian, Mikhail Zhvanetski, remarked in one of his skits that if you want to argue about the taste of coconuts (not available in the Soviet Union at that time), it’s better to talk to those who’ve actually tried them. If you want to argue about antisemitism in academia, better ask those who have actually experienced it. Ask me.
The U.S. Department of Education is taking seriously a charge of “a pervasive hostile environment for Jewish students and faculty” at George Mason. This is as shocking to me (and to many of my Jewish colleagues at GMU) as hearing that I have broken two legs and never noticed it.
Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Six months into his second term, President Donald Trump has forced changes at many of the nation’s wealthiest universities, some of which have shed hundreds of jobs amid federal funding issues and investigations.
While sector layoffs are so frequent that Inside Higher Ed has dedicated monthly coverage to rounding up such reductions, those actions are more common at small, cash-strapped colleges or state institutions reeling from budget cuts. But universities with multibillion-dollar endowments have been among those making the deepest cuts in the first half of 2025, often driven by freezes on federal funding that the Trump administration imposed with minimal notice.
FIRE
Excerpt: Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression sued Secretary of State Marco Rubio, challenging two federal immigration law provisions that give him unchecked power to revoke legal immigrants’ visas and deport them for protected speech.
Since March, Rubio and the Trump administration have waged an assault on free speech, targeting foreign university students for deportation based on bedrock protected speech like writing op-eds and attending protests. Their attack is casting a pall of fear over millions of noncitizens, who now worry that voicing the “wrong” opinion about America or Israel will result in deportation.
