Supporting Students Free Expression

Ruby Cramer
Washington Post

Excerpt: It was her last Monday morning in the library, and when Tania Galiñanes walked into her office and saw another box, she told herself that this would be the last one.

Inside were books. She didn’t know how many, or what they were, only that she would need to review each one by hand for age-appropriate material and sexual content as defined by Florida law, just as she’d been doing for months now with the 11,600 books on the shelves outside her door at Tohopekaliga High School. Last box, and then after this week, she would no longer be a librarian at all.

Jonathan Sumption
Unherd

Excerpt: Freedom of expression is probably the most widely acknowledged human right in the world. Lip service is paid to it even in totalitarian states. Freedom of expression is not worth much in Russia or North Korea, but their constitutions guarantee it in very similar terms as the United Nations. And yet, it is today under greater threat than any other human right. This is happening even, perhaps especially, in liberal democracies. How are we to explain this paradox?

Nell Gluckman
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: When Indiana’s abortion ban took effect, in the fall of 2022, Tamara Kay, a tenured professor in the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, tweeted that she was prepared to help students get access to health care. She hung a sign on her office door with her personal email address and a similar message.

About a month later, The Irish Rover, a student publication that says its mission is to uphold Notre Dame’s Roman Catholic identity, published an article about Kay titled “Keough School Professor Offers Abortion Access to Students.” A subhead read: “Abortion assistance offered to students despite IN law, ND policy.” In the days before the Rover article appeared, a business-school professor texted a student reporter that “there needs to be a coordinated assault on the Tamara Kay issue.”

Aaron Sibarium
The Free Press, Substack

Excerpt: In its own telling, Yale Law School’s Schell Center for International Human Rights seeks to “equip lawyers and other professionals with the knowledge and skills needed to advance the cause of international human rights.” The center has educated students and human rights professionals on atrocities large and small, issuing a detailed report last year on ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and proposing a framework in mid-September to moderate “indirect hate speech online”—whatever that means.

But six days after Hamas’ October 7 massacre over 1,400 Israelis and kidnapping of 240 more, the center was silent.

Michael Arria
Mondoweiss

Excerpt: Columbia University says its suspending two campus Palestine groups.

In a statement posted on the school’s website Senior Executive Vice President of the University and Chair of the Special Committee on Campus Safety Gerald Rosberg said the university is suspending Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) for the remainder of the fall term. The event that Rosberg referenced was a peaceful walkout and subsequent art installation. It was carried out as a part of a national call to action in response to the Israeli attacks on Gaza. So far over 10,000 Palestinians have been killed.

Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic

Excerpt: Late last month, the chancellor of Florida’s university system, acting in consultation with Governor Ron DeSantis, ordered state universities to deactivate all local chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine.

How could dissolving student groups be lawful, given constitutional protections for free speech and freedom of association? Although multiple local SJP chapters acted as apologists for the murders of Israeli civilians or stood in solidarity with the Hamas militants who killed and kidnapped children, even viewpoints that deplorable are entitled to First Amendment protection. But Florida says it is not targeting the protected speech of these groups. It is acting, instead, because the national SJP has run afoul of a state law against providing “material support” to a terrorist organization.