Trustee Responsibility Free Speech

Christopher Winship
The Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: There have been demands by faculty that the University better protect academic freedom and that the broader Harvard community better ensure civil, reasoned discourse. (For an important statement on inclusion and academic freedom, see Harvard’s 2018 Presidential Task Force Report on Inclusion and Belonging.)

I fully support such calls. I doubt, however, that they will change the behaviors of those who are genuinely convinced about the erroneousness of others’ beliefs and the validity of their own. I will make a different argument: that for academic freedom to prevail, all at Harvard must tolerate others and their beliefs.

Mark S. James
Academe Blog

Excerpt: Last August, my colleague wrote about how our university’s leadership has embraced a top-down corporate model as the way of running the university, and he proceeded to describe various instances when they have ignored shared governance and threatened academic freedom. This trend has continued unabated.

The most recent example of this is perhaps the most blatant, and it poses the most serious threat to academic freedom and shared governance yet. The administration is now deploying our office of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to impose a policy that has been rejected by our faculty two times now. But, as Nikole Hannah-Jones recently observed, DEI is now being used against efforts to increase diversity, promote equality, and foster inclusion.

Greg Lukianoff and Sean Stevens
The Eternally Radical Idea

Excerpt: Last week we demonstrated that deplatforming attempts involving students have exploded over the past decade, supporting one aspect of Sean and Jonathan Haidt’s “new dynamic” hypothesis — which states that college students have become more hostile toward free speech over the past decade than in previous generations.

But Sean and Haidt’s hypothesis was also about how students would increasingly target conservative expression for deplatforming, and a deep dive into FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database indicates that it’s true: Students did in fact target conservative expression more often over the past decade than they did in the preceding 16 years.

Samuel J. Abrams
Washington Examiner

Excerpt: Higher education is in crisis. A week rarely passes without an incident on a college campus in which cancel culture manages to shut down a speaker or an event. And while this sad state of affairs on campuses is now too familiar, self-censorship has moved well beyond leafy quads, lecture halls, and student unions and into the mainstream.

Samuel J. Abrams
Minding the Campus

Excerpt: The past five months have shown the world just how toxic speech is on college campuses. The climate for open inquiry and dialogue is under attack nationwide, and students are scared to speak, question, and express themselves freely. Using disparaging rhetoric, even violence, to prevent speech is now commonplace on campus, and thus, many students are turning inward, and genuine liberal learning is being interrupted. Yet, most college presidents believe their campuses are perfect examples of viewpoint diversity.

Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder
Banished, Substack

Excerpt: This is snake eating its own tail territory. A standard definition of "privilege" (one of DEI's core concepts) is disavowed because it conflicts with "inclusion" & "belonging." What happened here is, alas, entirely predictable, now that institutions have embraced such expansive definitions of “inclusion,” making grand promises to create campus environments where “any individual or group feels welcomed, respected, supported and valued” at all times.

Also note the wild concept creep in effect here regarding what counts as harm. A short riff on “privilege” is so “hurtful” that it demands a formal apology! And ultimately ends with a resignation.