Institutional Governance & Accountability

Christopher Winship
The Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: There have been demands by faculty that the University better protect academic freedom and that the broader Harvard community better ensure civil, reasoned discourse. (For an important statement on inclusion and academic freedom, see Harvard’s 2018 Presidential Task Force Report on Inclusion and Belonging.)

I fully support such calls. I doubt, however, that they will change the behaviors of those who are genuinely convinced about the erroneousness of others’ beliefs and the validity of their own. I will make a different argument: that for academic freedom to prevail, all at Harvard must tolerate others and their beliefs.

Greg Lukianoff and Sean Stevens
The Eternally Radical Idea

Excerpt: Last week we demonstrated that deplatforming attempts involving students have exploded over the past decade, supporting one aspect of Sean and Jonathan Haidt’s “new dynamic” hypothesis — which states that college students have become more hostile toward free speech over the past decade than in previous generations.

But Sean and Haidt’s hypothesis was also about how students would increasingly target conservative expression for deplatforming, and a deep dive into FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database indicates that it’s true: Students did in fact target conservative expression more often over the past decade than they did in the preceding 16 years.

Samuel J. Abrams
Washington Examiner

Excerpt: Higher education is in crisis. A week rarely passes without an incident on a college campus in which cancel culture manages to shut down a speaker or an event. And while this sad state of affairs on campuses is now too familiar, self-censorship has moved well beyond leafy quads, lecture halls, and student unions and into the mainstream.

Samuel J. Abrams
Minding the Campus

Excerpt: The past five months have shown the world just how toxic speech is on college campuses. The climate for open inquiry and dialogue is under attack nationwide, and students are scared to speak, question, and express themselves freely. Using disparaging rhetoric, even violence, to prevent speech is now commonplace on campus, and thus, many students are turning inward, and genuine liberal learning is being interrupted. Yet, most college presidents believe their campuses are perfect examples of viewpoint diversity.

David French
New York Times

Excerpt: This Monday, March 11, roughly 200 Jewish students and supporters marched through the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, and it was newsworthy that they were not attacked. Local news hailed that they were able to, as one headline noted, “successfully march without confrontation.”

I spent virtually my entire legal career defending free speech on campus, including the free speech of Muslim students and staff members. I’ve also walked through metal detectors at a tense and volatile Columbia University to defend the academic freedom of Jewish students challenging antisemitic statements made by university professors. And during those decades of litigation and my subsequent years in journalism, I have never seen such comprehensive abuse directed against a vulnerable campus minority group as I’ve seen directed at Jewish students and faculty since Hamas’s terror attack on Oct. 7.

Ilya Somin
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Notre Dame law Professor Derek Muller—a leading election law scholar—has posted a study he conducted of the partisan distribution of political donations by law professors between 2017 and 2023. Not surprisingly, they skew overwhelmingly towards Democratic candidates.

The overall result here is far from surprising. Lots of previous studies find that law professors are skew towards the political left. Still, the extent of the imbalance is notable. Exclusively Democratic contributors outnumber exclusively Republican ones by over 35 to 1. That's a larger disproportion than in previous studies.