Supporting Students Free Expression

Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff
Washington Post

Excerpt: The University of Texas at Austin is laying off dozens of employees who previously worked in diversity, equity and inclusion roles in response to a state law that banned such programs, according to the Texas chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

Employees who had previously worked in DEI roles received layoff notices Tuesday. That came months after the university had reassigned them from those positions to comply with the legislation, which went into effect Jan. 1. The school declined to provide a specific tally of the number of people affected, though the AAUP said 60 is a “conservative estimate.”

Randall Kennedy
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: On a posting for a position as an assistant professor in international and comparative education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, applicants are required to submit a CV, a cover letter, a research statement, three letters of reference, three or more writing samples, and a statement of teaching philosophy that includes a description of their “orientation toward diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.”

At Harvard and elsewhere, hiring for academic jobs increasingly requires these so-called diversity statements, which Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning describes as being “about your commitment to furthering EDIB within the context of institutions of higher education.” By requiring academics to profess — and flaunt — faith in DEI, the proliferation of diversity statements poses a profound challenge to academic freedom.

Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted a speech by Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Democrat, at the University of Maryland on Thursday, the Capital News Service reported.

The protesters shouted that Raskin was “complicit in genocide,” to which he responded that he has advocated for hostages to be freed and for a ceasefire. Raskin was unable to continue his planned speech on democracy as the protesters continued heckling him and arguing with audience members. But he said he was willing to take questions, which led to further discussion about Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. University President Darryll Pines eventually stepped in to end the lecture early.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: This year began with a seismic event in higher education: Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard University’s first Black president after Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and leading crusader against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, publicized plagiarism allegations against her.

Her resignation was followed by high-profile allegations against a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who’s married to one of Gay’s most prominent critics, which fueled concerns over a coming “plagiarism war” with the right and left lobbing accusations at scholars on the other team. The war, so far, looks like a one-sided affair. Rufo and conservative media outlets have published multiple accusations of plagiarism and research misconduct, several of which appear serious and have made splashes in major mainstream media outlets.

Rita Koganzon
Hedgehog Review

Excerpt: When I was a graduate teaching assistant at Harvard University a decade ago, one of my students missed a final exam because he forgot to set his alarm. I didn’t learn about this because he told me, in person or even by email; nor did he apologize for his oversight or ask if he could make up the exam. Instead, in the manner customary at Harvard, I was informed by a message from his “Residential Dean,” a faculty member living in the dorms whose job was to liaise between delinquent students and their professors, in part by composing their excuses for them.

This is not some recent, overzealous response to the outsized demands of student activists; it is, rather, an old model that Harvard and only a few other very selective colleges have long followed, but which other schools all over the country now strive to imitate.

Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic

Excerpt: Roughly a decade after the movement for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, began to spread in American higher education, a political backlash is here. The Chronicle of Higher Education has tallied 80 bills since 2023 that aim to restrict DEI in some way, by banning DEI offices, mandatory diversity training, faculty diversity statements, and more. Eight have already become law, including in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, North Dakota, and Utah. The worst of these laws violate academic independence and free speech by attempting to forbid certain ideas in the classroom.

Utah’s Equal Opportunities Initiatives, or H.B. 261, which was signed into law in January, is more promising. It attempts to end the excessive and at times coercive focus on identity in higher education while also trying to protect academic freedom with carve-outs for research and course teaching.