Your Cart is Empty
Ramesh Ponnuru
Washington Post
PEN America is a venerable organization of writers that, it says on its website, “stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide.” In recent years, though, it has more often stood at the intersection of political infighting and bad publicity.
The latest black eye: Dinaw Mengestu, a novelist who became PEN America’s president last December, resigned on July 9 and then, in an essay for Literary Hub, attacked “the organization’s hypocrisy,” “dishonesty” and “bigotry.” As in past PEN America controversies, the flash point was disagreement over Israel and the Palestinians. The underlying causes are the literary world’s expansive sense of its social role and confusion about what counts as a threat to free speech — and what doesn’t.
Comments will be approved before showing up.
Rep. Elise Stefanik’s withering questioning of presidents of prominent colleges during a congressional hearing on antisemitism became a flashpoint in the national debate over campus speech. Then the New York Republican wrote a book about it.
In Poisoned Ivies, published earlier this year, Representative Stefanik decries the “academic rot” at prestigious institutions like Columbia and Harvard Universities and the University of Pennsylvania, whose leaders eventually resigned amid criticism of their handling of 2024 protests over the war in Gaza. But Stefanik levies her critique more broadly at “American colleges and universities,” “campuses across the country,” and a “broken system.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s widely criticized rule limiting how long international students can stay in the country won’t take effect Sept. 15 after a federal judge postponed the rule as part of a lawsuit challenging the policy.
Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts wrote in a 48-page order that Trump officials didn’t respond adequately to public comments on the rule or consider alternative options, among other violations of the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how departments create regulations. The department also failed to show a rational connection between the rule and its purported national security objectives.
The grief Emily Taylor had been holding at bay finally washed over her in January. It had been four months since a lone gunman shot Charlie Kirk in the throat at Utah Valley University, killing the conservative commentator in minutes. That winter “was the first time in my entire life that I didn’t go back to school,” said the former English professor, holding back tears.
Taylor had resigned from her tenured position in December to save her tiny college in South Carolina from a political witch hunt in which lawmakers threatened to pull her school’s funding because she’d written a brief essay acknowledging that before his violent death, Kirk had employed violent rhetoric.
