Alumni Free Speech Advocacy

Heather Perlberg, Janet Lorin and Bloomberg
Fortune

Excerpt: First it was Apollo Global Management’s Marc Rowan blasting the University of Pennsylvania, then Dick Wolf of Law & Order followed by former US diplomat and businessman Jon Huntsman and billionaire Ronald Lauder.

Now it’s David Magerman, who helped build the trading systems of Renaissance Technologies. He castigated Penn’s “misguided moral compass” in a letter to President Elizabeth Magill and board chair Scott Bok, citing the school’s hosting of the Palestine Writes Literature Festival last month and its response to the Hamas attack on Israel in October.

Bryan Paul
Washington Examiner

Excerpt: When thinking of college alumni, one generally imagines boosters donning their alma mater’s signature colors and cheering proudly for their team at homecoming games, or a multimillionaire being courted at campus events and donating substantial sums to fund an institution’s new building, sports complex, or scholarship program.

Press release
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a lawsuit on behalf of six California community college professors to halt new, systemwide regulations forcing professors to espouse and teach politicized conceptions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Each of the professors teach at one of three Fresno-area community colleges within the State Center Community College District. Under the new regulations, all of the more-than-54,000 professors who teach in the California Community Colleges system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching.

The regulations explicitly require professors to pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. Professors must “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and they must develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.” Faculty performance and tenure will be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of the government’s viewpoints.

Annabelle Timsit
Washington Post

Excerpt: A federal judge in Arkansas temporarily blocked a state law that would have made it a crime for librarians and booksellers to give minors materials deemed “harmful” to them — a move celebrated by free-speech advocates, who had decried the law as a violation of individual liberties.

Section 1 would have made it a criminal offense to knowingly provide a minor with any material deemed “harmful” — a term defined by state law as containing nudity or sexual content, appealing to a “prurient interest in sex,” lacking “serious literary, scientific, medical, artistic, or political value for minors” or deemed “inappropriate for minors” under current community standards.

Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Excerpt: Today, a 17-year-old rising senior represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression sued his Tennessee public high school after the principal suspended him for posting memes lampooning the principal for being overly serious.

“The First Amendment bars public school employees from acting as a 24/7 board of censors,” said FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick. “As long as a student’s posts do not substantially disrupt school, what teens post on social media on their own time is between them and their parents, not the government.”

Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder
Washington Monthly

Excerpt: The Supreme Court’s rejection of affirmative action in college admissions will provoke widespread debate. But not in the classrooms of Florida’s public colleges and universities, because the Stop WOKE Act prohibits it. 

That’s why we were happy to submit an amicus brief last Friday to support the plaintiffs—seven faculty members and a student group—seeking to strike down the Stop WOKE Act. The law is subject to a preliminary injunction, pending appeal from Florida. The federal appeals court for the Eleventh Circuit is expected to rule in the next six months.