Supporting Students Free Expression

Brian Rosenberg
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: I suspect that I am not the only former college president who has experienced a mild bout of PTSD during the past several months, as the frequency, intensity, and visibility of attacks on presidents have increased to a level that would have been difficult to imagine even on my worst days.

Nathan Honeycutt
FIRE

Excerpt: Confidence in higher education has plummeted to its lowest level ever according to the results of two new national polls commissioned by FIRE and conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.

Per the polls, American confidence in higher education has plummeted over the past year, reaching record lows after months of campus protests over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Congressional hearings about anti-Semitism on college campuses.

Megan McArdle
Washington Post

Excerpt: After a decade of ever-escalating commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion, elite campuses are reversing course. It's amazing to watch such an abrupt volte-face. What’s even more amazing is how far things went beforehand and how long the correction took to arrive.

Such double-think regimes are vulnerable to what economist Timur Kuran calls a “preference cascade in reverse”: As people realize their neighbors share their skepticism, they start voicing their true opinions, an effect that dominoes until the whole regime collapses.

Jessie Appleby
FIRE

Excerpt: Despite the real benefits of virtual meetings, they are not a replacement for real life. At its best, they facilitate meetings and communication that otherwise could not have occurred. But a screen cannot replicate the experience of an in-person gathering. In short, virtual events and in-person events are not interchangeable.

Yet many universities have started treating them as such. In recent years, FIRE has seen schools increasingly rely on the availability of virtual meeting platforms to evade their constitutional and other free speech obligations to provide sufficient security for events to proceed without sustained disruption.

Kurt Streeter
New York Times

Excerpt: Waves of boos, angry chants and the steady rhythm of feet pounding on metal seats were upending the graduation ceremony at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Viva, viva Palestina!” students sang out. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Israel’s apartheid has got to go!”

Once it was over and most had left the school’s low-slung football stadium, Berkeley’s chancellor, Carol Christ, sat near the podium in a folding chair. She is silver-haired and soft-spoken, a soon-to-retire 80-year-old former English professor with an unusual background for the modern college president: Her views on free speech first crystallized during her years as a student protester in the turbulent 1960s.

Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Louisiana governor Jeff Landry signed a bill into law Wednesday that grants him new powers to directly appoint board chairs at the state’s public colleges and universities. Landry, a Republican, then immediately ousted University of Louisiana System board chair Jimmy Clarke and re-appointed Mark Romero, who held the role under previous governor John Bel Edwards in 2019.

The bill landed on Landry’s desk on May 31 after flying through the state legislature with strong Republican support. Sponsored by Republican senator Valarie Hodges, the controversial bill reflects a growing push from conservative lawmakers to exercise greater influence in higher education governance.