Trustee Responsibility Free Speech

Michael Brendan Dougherty
National Review

Excerpt: Conservatives have sought to prevent the encampments from spreading by drawing strong distinctions between free-speech protections for the students and standards of manners, anti-harassment regulations, and the like. This may be what is legally required of state universities like the University of Florida, where Ben Sasse made those distinctions as clear as possible.

But it’s entirely inadequate for the role that Columbia and the other Ivy League colleges want to play in our republic. The standard is not just free speech, or more speech to counter bad speech, but truthful speech.

Ted Balaker
The Coddling of the American Mind Movie, Substack

Excerpt: Most of our “DVD extras” are paywalled, but we’re making this one available to everyone. In it, Jonathan Haidt touches on the role universities, specifically administrators, play in encouraging students to think in binary terms, to see the world as battle between good and evil.

Jon references the work of Samuel Abrams, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College. Abrams conducted a national survey of college administrators who work directly with students. He found that “liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one.” That makes administrators the most left-lopsided group on campus

Eric Spitznagel
Free Press

Excerpt: The recent wave of violent protests and arrests at elite universities like Yale and Columbia have only confirmed for Scott Katz that he made the right decision to attend Elon University. The North Carolina college, where he is currently wrapping up his sophomore year, is a long way from his hometown of Lafayette Hill, the predominantly liberal Philadelphia suburb where the average home costs $610,000.

Katz, who is Jewish, says the antisemitism that’s increasingly visible at colleges nationwide—especially in the Ivy League, and other elite institutions like Stanford and Berkeley—hasn’t even touched his campus.

Samuel J. Abrams
Minding the Campus

Excerpt: Closing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) offices around the country is a powerful step in halting the illiberal and divisive harm-centric monoculture that has taken over higher education. However, there remain far too many student-facing administrative offices that seek the same goals.

Whether in residential services or student life offices, administrators wield significant power and influence over students, affecting their learning and future trajectories. It’s crucial to address any dangerous or divisive behavior exhibited by these administrators.

Yolanda Wang, Yurii Stasiuk, and Tristan Hernandez
Yale Daily News

Excerpt: Early Saturday morning, the Yale Corporation — the University’s highest governing body, which includes 16 trustees as well as University President Peter Salovey — convened at the Greenberg Conference Center for their last meeting before the summer recess.

The Yale Corporation meeting comes the morning after pro-divestment protesters stayed overnight on Beinecke Plaza with an encampment of more than 25 tents. The encampment followed a mass protest during Salovey’s farewell dinner in the Schwarzman Center last night, and a week-long effort by various students and groups to occupy the plaza. The Corporation — which is in charge of the search for Yale’s 24th president — is also in the eighth month of its search but has not shared a timeline for when the decision will be made. Salovey is set to step down on June 30.

Sherman Criner
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Excerpt: According to a recent Axios poll, Republican and Democratic college students agree that campuses must broaden free speech “even if there’s some risk of violence.” Moreover, roughly 77 percent of respondents said that free speech “should be protected” regardless of whether someone finds it “deeply upsetting.”

In a time when safe spaces and censorship dominate our universities’ political discourse, some may find this bipartisan support for free speech surprising. After all, other recent polls have illustrated how Republicans and Democrats vehemently disagree on fundamental questions, such as the necessity of political correctness and whether hate speech even exists.