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Brendan Cantwell
Ungated, Substack
Excerpt: The Trump administration on Wednesday evening released a memo inviting University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia to enter into a “compact” (henceforth The Compact) with the federal government.
I will say that if the provisions outlined in The Compact were required by law, it sure seems like the administration would not need a special deal that offers preferred client status as an incentive to get what it wants. Read The Compact for yourself. It’s about 10 pages long. In the meantime, here is my assessments for why this is a rotten deal.
Gabe Levin
The Nation
Excerpt: Dr. Eric Cheyfitz, a professor of American studies at Cornell, said the university has canceled the two classes he was set to teach this semester. It comes as the provost is recommending that he be suspended for two semesters without pay on the grounds that he violated federal antidiscrimination laws, The Nation has learned.
Cheyfitz’s lawyer, Luna Droubi, said it’s the latest turn in months of investigations—carried out by different university bodies—into whether Cheyfitz, 84, told a graduate student last semester to drop a class he was teaching about Gaza because the student is Israeli. Cheyfitz, who is Jewish and whose daughter and grandchildren live in Israel, denies the allegation.
Sabrina Tavernise
New York Times
Excerpt: Two days after Charlie Kirk was killed, Suzanne Swierc, an employee at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., woke up to a cascade of missed calls, texts and voice mail messages from numbers she did not know.
Ms. Swierc (pronounced swirtz) discovered that the barrage stemmed from something she had posted on Facebook the day before: “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.” Her Facebook settings were private, but one of her followers must have taken a screen shot and sent it on without her knowledge.
Michael Regnier
Free The Inquiry, Heterodox Academy
Excerpt: More than a week after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the shock waves are still rolling through higher education. Kirk’s murder, on a college campus, in the act of open debate, was committed by a killer who reportedly believed that “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Although the assassin was a college dropout, his apparent logic was very familiar on campus: some ideas are just “hate,” and the normal rules don’t apply.
But those of us doing campus programming should look in the mirror before we mention dialogue programs in the same breath as Charlie Kirk. As Redstone points out, Kirk “was pro-life, he supported the police, he questioned systemic racism, and he believed there were only two genders.” These are all squarely mainstream, and in some cases majority, viewpoints in the United States, yet scandalous on many campuses.
Greg Lukianoff
New York Times
Excerpt: If you’re a free-speech lawyer, you face a choice: Either expect to be disappointed by people of all political stripes — or go crazy. I choose low expectations.
Again and again, political actors preach the importance of free speech, only to reach for the censor’s muzzle when it helps their side. If, like me, you defend free speech as a principle rather than invoke it opportunistically, you get distressingly accustomed to seeing the same people take opposite positions on an issue, sometimes within the space of just a few months.
J. D. Tuccille
Reason Magazine
Excerpt: The First Amendment is alive and well, which is a reassuring note about the basic legal protections for free speech. Unfortunately, it's not enough. The world is full of countries with written protections for liberty that are frequently honored in the breach because people and politicians don't really believe in them (cough, Canada, cough). The true foundation for free speech in the U.S. has always been a culture that supports unfettered expression, of which the First Amendment is just an extension.
But less than two weeks after Charlie Kirk was murdered because an assassin apparently didn't like what he had to say, it's obvious that free speech culture is besieged.
