Your Cart is Empty
The pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments that sprang up on many campuses in spring 2024 created unprecedented conditions for an aggressive crackdown on student speech. Unlike during previous protest movements, such as the Vietnam War, when most students took one side of an issue against the adult establishment, the pro-Palestinian movement pitted pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian students—and faculty—against one another, fueling tensions that spilled into classrooms, dorms and quads.
That unrest collided squarely with President Donald Trump’s re-election and his second-term agenda, which included targeted attacks on both immigrants and “woke” higher ed institutions.
Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, is the sort of highly selective institution that jockeys for the unofficial title of Harvard of the South. Recently, the university’s chancellor had a new idea: What if Vanderbilt was also in San Francisco? Maybe it could become the Harvard of the West too.
This new tactic, pioneered by Northeastern University a few years ago, is taking the satellite-campus concept to its logical extreme: the national-chain model of undergraduate education. If it works for Vanderbilt, other selective institutions are likely to follow.
Texas Tech leaders have somehow convinced themselves that race and gender are not legitimate topics to discuss in a psychology class. That’s absurd on its face: You can’t teach human behavior while treating basic dimensions of human identity as off-limits.
Will Crescioni, a lecturer in Texas Tech’s Department of Psychological Sciences, submitted his course materials for his honors-level psychology course the same day the Texas Tech system issued a memo ordering universities to review courses and ensure faculty do not “promote or otherwise inculcate” certain ideas related to race and gender. Just over a month later — and only two days before the semester began — his course was scrapped. His offense? Refusing to alter his course content.
Five months after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, a wave of lawsuits reveals how Americans were investigated, fired, and in one case, arrested for their online reactions to his death.
The most dramatic case involves Larry Bushart, a retired police officer in Lexington, Tenn. A self-described progressive and "keyboard warrior," he'd been posting memes that mocked Republican officials' mourning over Kirk. Then local police came to his door.
On February 10, 2026, PEN America, joined by a broad group of 36 organizational partners, wrote to the Board of Regents of Texas A&M University to request that they rescind two policies, passed in fall 2025, that have resulted in the censorship of academic courses across the institution, and the announced closure of the University’s Women’s & Gender Studies Program.
The letter explains that these policies are not only a threat to academic freedom, but, put simply, that “Censorship undermines the quality of education that faculty can offer students.” As recent news reports are making clear, these policies are limiting students’ access to education, particularly when it comes to course content related to race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Harvard University has more than 100 students who are in the Reserve Officer Training Corps. They will get their diploma and then put their life on the line for their country, serving under a secretary of defense, if he is still in his job by spring, who has nothing but contempt for their education and their alma mater.
In a statement issued on Friday, Pete Hegseth charged that Harvard is graduating officers with “heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks.” He declared that the Pentagon would cut all ties with Harvard and its programs.
