Supporting Students Free Expression

David Brooks
New York Times

Excerpt: Over the past five weeks, Jewish students on America’s campuses have found themselves confronted with those who celebrate a terrorist operation that featured the mass murder and reportedly the rape of fellow Jews. They see images of people tearing down posters of kidnapped Jewish children. At M.I.T., Jewish students report that they were told by some faculty members to avoid the university’s main lobby — which had been the site of a pro-Palestinian protest — for their own safety. At Cooper Union, Jewish students were barricaded in the library by a protest that started out as a pro-Palestinian demonstration and quickly became, one student reported, “pure anti-Jew.”

Richard Amesbury and Catherine O’Donnell
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Academics are losing the support of the public. We read it in newspapers, we see it in surveys, we feel it in our bones. There are many dimensions to this problem. One is the claim that colleges restrict speech and lack intellectual diversity.

Whether and by whom free speech is under threat on campuses are hotly debated questions. Less commonly examined, however, are the assumptions that free speech is a cardinal virtue of higher education, and that colleges should aspire to a diversity of opinions. Are these goals in their own right, as college administrators often seem to think, or means for achieving something else altogether?

David Brooks
New York Times

Excerpt: Over the past five weeks, Jewish students on America’s campuses have found themselves confronted with those who celebrate a terrorist operation that featured the mass murder and reportedly the rape of fellow Jews. They see images of people tearing down posters of kidnapped Jewish children.

Universities are supposed to be centers of inquiry and curiosity — places where people are tolerant of difference and learn about other points of view. Instead, too many have become brutalizing ideological war zones, so today the most hostile place to be an American Jew is not at some formerly restricted country club but on a college campus.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: A professor is suing the Mayo Clinic medical school after a department chair threatened to fire him following a CNN interview in which he criticized the National Institutes of Health for not backing a COVID-19 treatment and a New York Times interview in which he said testosterone improves athletic performance.

Dr. Michael J. Joyner, an anesthesiology professor, filed the lawsuit Monday in a Minnesota state court in Olmsted County against the Mayo Clinic, Mayo’s College of Medicine and Science, Dr. Gianrico Farrugia and Dr. Carlos B. Mantilla.

Bari Weiss
The Free Press, Substack

Excerpt: What is happening today on our college campuses—the places where our future leaders are nurtured, but more often pampered, pandered to, insulated, and infantilized—is not new. Since the very first days of The Free Press, we have been reporting on it.

But the need to restore wisdom, open inquiry, and common sense to our universities has never been more urgent than at this moment.  That’s why we’re sponsoring 1,000 paid yearlong subscriptions to The Free Press. And every college administrator in the country who wants one is eligible.

Freddie DeBoer
Substack

Excerpt: There was an essay version of this, but honestly I don’t think any essay writing is necessary - the systematic silencing of Palestinian and Palestine-supporting voices is happening, no one is even pretending that it’s not happening, and it’s a direct threat to the basic principles of free expression that are supposed to apply to everyone and every topic, no matter what.