Campus Protests and Free Expression

George Packer
The Atlantic

Excerpt: Fifty-six years ago this week, at the height of the Vietnam War, Columbia University students occupied half a dozen campus buildings and made two principal demands of the university: stop funding military research, and cancel plans to build a gym in a nearby Black neighborhood. After a week of futile negotiations, Columbia called in New York City police to clear the occupation.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: A recent announcement from The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) tells us something we knew was coming: the Biden Administration is walking back the improvements in Title IX made by Betsy DeVos. (Yes, it was one of the few good things done under Trump.) The original rules, which bear on how colleges adjudicate sexual misconduct, were put in place by Obama, then rolled back and made more fair by DeVos, and now Biden’s reverting the law to the Obama standards, which are palpably unfair because they take away rights from the accused that are in place in real courts.

Yolanda Wang, Yurii Stasiuk, and Tristan Hernandez
Yale Daily News

Excerpt: Early Saturday morning, the Yale Corporation — the University’s highest governing body, which includes 16 trustees as well as University President Peter Salovey — convened at the Greenberg Conference Center for their last meeting before the summer recess.

The Yale Corporation meeting comes the morning after pro-divestment protesters stayed overnight on Beinecke Plaza with an encampment of more than 25 tents. The encampment followed a mass protest during Salovey’s farewell dinner in the Schwarzman Center last night, and a week-long effort by various students and groups to occupy the plaza. The Corporation — which is in charge of the search for Yale’s 24th president — is also in the eighth month of its search but has not shared a timeline for when the decision will be made. Salovey is set to step down on June 30.

Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic

Excerpt: This month, Professor Randall L. Kennedy, an eminent scholar of race and civil rights, published an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson denouncing the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in academic hiring. “I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice,” he wrote. “The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince.” But a “contrasting perspective” on diversity statements that the Crimson published argued that “furor over diversity statements in hiring is a red herring.”

But people who see the flaws of the status quo should not be seduced by the illusion that tweaking how DEI statements are solicited or scored is a solution. In fact, interviewing Hall, the ostensible reformer in the Harvard Crimson debate, left me more convinced that abolishing DEI statements is the best way forward.

Sean Stevens
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression released “The Judge Duncan Shoutdown: What Stanford Students Think.” This retrospective survey report combines data from a FIRE and College Pulse survey conducted last year after the shoutdown of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford University with an analysis of FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings survey data, which was administered before — and extended through the time of — the shoutdown.

Kathryn Palmer
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Six months after the Israel-Hamas war set off a new wave of campus activism in the United States, students are still protesting in full force. And at some institutions administrators are responding to student demonstrators—especially supporters of Palestinians—with increasingly harsh discipline.

In some ways, the actions of the students and the college administrators resemble campus climates during the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War and the apartheid era in South Africa, among other eras of social upheaval. What has changed, however, is the pressure politicians and donors now exert on college leaders to support a particular viewpoint.