Your Cart is Empty
By Francesca Block, Princeton '22
March 23, 2023
The system of punishment at Stanford is more than a decade old. Class of 1977 alum Bob Ottilie, . . .who has represented over 100 students investigated by Stanford since 2011, said a majority choose to admit responsibility and accept a lesser punishment through an “early resolution option,” which is like a plea deal. While some take this approach because they committed the violation, he said many choose it because they feel the odds are stacked against them. He sees Stanford’s disciplinary process not as a system designed to find truth, but to punish “bad behavior.” “Think about that,” he added. “That’s a presumption of guilt.” . . . In an April 2021 report, [a Stanford] committee concluded that the university’s disciplinary process is “overly punitive” and “not educational.” Less than one year later, Katie Meyer was dead.
Administering an exam used to be straightforward: All a college professor needed was an open room and a stack of blue books. At many American universities, this is no longer true. Professors now struggle to accommodate the many students with an official disability designation, which may entitle them to extra time, a distraction-free environment, or the use of otherwise-prohibited technology.
No one should be kept from taking a class, for example, because they are physically unable to enter the building where it’s taught. Over the past decade and a half, however, the share of students at selective universities who qualify for accommodations—often, extra time on tests—has grown at a breathtaking pace.
University of Oklahoma officials placed a graduate teaching assistant on leave Sunday after a student who was given a failing grade on a written assignment claimed she was discriminated against due to her religious beliefs.
Samantha Fulnecky, a junior psychology major at the university, submitted an essay response to an assigned article in a psychology class about how people are perceived based on societal expectations of gender. Her response focused on her interpretations of the Bible and the ways in which she disagreed with the article.
The recent controversies surrounding Charlie Kirk — and the extraordinary reaction that followed his campus appearances and commentary — offer a revealing window into the fragile state of free expression in contemporary America.
Two recent New York Times opinion pieces examining the backlash were right to highlight how quickly public discourse has hardened into a zero-sum contest in which speech itself becomes grounds for professional punishment, social ostracism, and institutional retaliation. But the deeper lesson is even more unsettling: Free speech is increasingly treated not as a constitutional principle, but as a conditional privilege — one that applies only when speech is politically comfortable.
