More colleges threaten to restrict speech in wake of Penn president’s resignation

December 18, 2023 1 min read

Jessie Appleby and Graham Piro
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Free speech fallout continues from the disastrous congressional testimony on campus anti-Semitism given earlier this month by the presidents of Penn, MIT, and Harvard. Now, at least three other elite universities have announced that calls for genocide would violate their policies. Last week, FIRE wrote Stanford University, Columbia University, and Yale University, urging them to forgo revising their policies to punish speech that allegedly calls for genocide, because such an overbroad rule risks prohibiting protected speech including hyperbole, satire, or ambiguous language.

Click here for link to full article

Leave a comment


Also in National Free Speech News & Commentary

Conservatives Seize the Moment to Remake Higher Ed

April 09, 2025 1 min read

Josh Moody 
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: With the Trump administration taking special aim at higher education, conservative policymakers and college leaders are embracing the opportunity to force a cultural reset across academe.

At a forum Tuesday morning called “Reclaiming the Culture of American Higher Education,” the architects of Project 2025, an official from the U.S. Department of Education and four college presidents cast the sector as ripe for reform. The event offered insights into how conservative thinkers operating the levers of power at the Education Department view the current state of higher education and the need for change.

Read More
Trump Team to Freeze Nearly $2 Billion at Cornell and Northwestern Universities

April 08, 2025 1 min read

Douglas Belkin and Meridith McGraw
Wall Street Journal 

Excerpt: The Trump administration has frozen more than $1 billion in federal funding for Cornell and $790 million for Northwestern, according to a Trump administration official.

The federal government is investigating both schools for alleged civil-rights violations, as part of a rapidly expanding crackdown on elite research universities across the U.S. The latest funding at issue relates to grants and contracts with the departments of agriculture, defense, education and health and human services.

Read More
UConn Med now lets students opt out of DEI pledge of allegiance

April 07, 2025 1 min read

Ross Marchand 
FIRE

Excerpt: Great news: UConn School of Medicine administrators are going scalpels down on the school’s attempt to forcibly transplant politics and ideology into its incoming student body. 

In 2022, UConn finalized its own version of the Hippocratic Oath, which includes a promise to “actively support policies that promote social justice and specifically work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination and racism.” Most recently, UConn required the incoming class of 2028 to pledge allegiance not simply to patient care, but to support diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Read More