Supporting Students Free Expression

James Huffman
National Association of Scholars

Excerpt: Academics from across the political spectrum have appropriately objected to some recently proposed laws as threats to academic freedom and thereby to higher education’s historic mission—the discovery and dissemination of knowledge. The principle of academic freedom has long stood as the guarantor of the free and open inquiry requisite to the academic pursuit of truth and is widely understood to allow for no exceptions.

But adherence to the principle does not preclude all limits on faculty conduct. Academic freedom does not require colleges and universities to tolerate bad teaching or incompetence. Nor should it protect professorial conduct that undermines open inquiry and pursuit of truth.

Hannah Natanson
Washington Post

Excerpt: The American Library Association is facing a partisan firefight unlike anything in its almost 150-year history. The once-uncontroversial organization, which says it is the world’s largest and oldest library association and which provides funding, training and tools to most of the country’s 123,000 libraries, has become entangled in the education culture wars — the raging debates over what and how to teach about race, sex and gender — culminating in Tuesday’s Senatorial name-check.

Eugene Volokh
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: As readers of the blog may know, Hamline University declined to renew Erica López Prater's instructor contract because she displayed Islamic Art containing images of Mohammed in her World Art class, and some students objected. López Prater sued, and on Friday Judge Katherine M. Menendez (D. Minn.) allowed her religious discrimination claim to go forward (López Prater v. Trustees of the Hamline Univ. of Minn.)

Frederick M. Hess
Forbes

Excerpt: It’s been a long few years when it comes to free inquiry on campus, with tales of silenced speakers and stymied discourse having become all too familiar. Amidst plunging trust in higher education, it’s safe to say that all this has had real costs. Last week, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and College Pulse jointly issued their annual report on the state of free speech in higher education. They surveyed more than 55,000 students across 248 colleges.

The numbers are troubling but not as hopeless as more hysterical accounts suggest.

Joshua T. Katz
City Journal

Excerpt: It’s September, students and teachers are returning to classes, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), in partnership with the survey research and analytics company College Pulse, has released its 2024 College Free Speech Rankings. The statistics are as disheartening as ever.

Of the 248 colleges and universities surveyed (plus six “warning colleges”)—up from 55 in 2020 and 203 (plus five) last year—only four are ranked “Good”: Michigan Technological University, Auburn, the University of New Hampshire, and Oregon State.

Jay Bhattacharya
The Free Press

Excerpt: My parents had taught me that people here could criticize the government, even over matters of life and death, without worry that the government would censor or suppress us. But over the past three years, I have been robbed of that conviction. American government officials, working in concert with big tech companies, have attacked and suppressed my speech and that of my colleagues for criticizing official pandemic policies—criticism that has been proven prescient.

The headline is a good one: the federal government can no longer threaten social media companies with destruction if they don’t censor on behalf of the government.