Supporting Students Free Expression

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Press Release

Excerpt: Human rights experts today expressed grave concern at the massive crackdown on pro-Palestinian student protests at various university campuses across the United States of America.

“The banning and attacks on student protests are a grave violation of the rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression guaranteed by international human rights law, and must stop immediately,” said the experts, who addressed their concerns to the US government in a previous communication.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: As the news broke about a gunman’s July 13 attempt to kill former president Donald Trump during a Pennsylvania rally, John James, an English instructor at Bellarmine University in Louisville, posted on Instagram above one of the latest headlines: “If you’re gonna shoot, man, don’t miss.”

That university said it received a bomb threat July 15 connected to anger over the post, though police eventually determined the threat wasn’t credible. Bellarmine fired James the next day, three days after the shooting, he said. “I wasn’t given an opportunity to clarify my statement, to apologize or anything,” he said.

Nick Gillespie
Reason

Excerpt: Ted and Courtney Balaker are the team behind the new documentary The Coddling of the American Mind. Based on the 2018 best-selling book by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, the film follows a series of students as they navigate life on today's highly charged college campuses. I spoke with Courtney and Ted, who started his video career as one of the first hires at Reason TV, about the Gen Z mental health crisis, free speech, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs, the oppressor-victim worldview, and why they chose to host the film on the innovative platform Substack rather than a more traditional venue.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: After several years of effort, graduate students getting paid for research or teaching at the University of Chicago joined a labor union.  Because they couldn’t form a union de novo but had to join an existing one, they became dues-paying members of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, Local 11o3.

But joining the union came with an unexpected downside: unions can take political and ideological positions, and as a member of one (qualified students are required to join and pay union dues), you implicitly sign on to those positions.  And you may not want to do that.  In the case at hand, the Union has taken pro-Palestinian positions, and some students, especially Jewish ones, don’t want to sign on to these positions. So a group called “Graduate Students for Academic Freedom” has sued the union, alleging that the union makes them engage in implicit endorsement of the union’s positions.

Jonathan Zimmerman
Philadelphia Inquirer

Excerpt: How should schools regulate what students post on the internet?
I don’t know. But here’s what I do know: We’ll never craft good policies around online student speech unless we listen to what students have to say.

That’s been the missing voice in the controversy in Great Valley, a Chester County school district where middle school students made 22 TikTok accounts impersonating their teachers. Some of the fake videos were truly horrible, casting the teachers as pedophiles or depicting them in sexual encounters with each other.

Steven Porter
Boston Globe

Excerpt: Prosecutors are pressing forward with formal criminal charges against most of the 12 people who were arrested when pro-Palestinian demonstrators attempted to establish an encampment May 1 at the University of New Hampshire.

A prosecutor with the UNH Police Department filed formal complaints Wednesday against eight defendants, including six who were UNH students at the time of their arrest, alleging they committed misdemeanor trespassing and disorderly conduct by refusing to comply with a dispersal order, according to court records.