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The months since Charlie Kirk’s murder on Utah Valley University’s campus in September have seen a deluge of firings and suspensions of teachers, faculty, and staff across the country for celebrating the assassination, or just for being insufficiently mournful. As the dust settles and court cases proceed, more details are emerging about the political pressures universities faced to punish protected political expression.
In Iowa, lawmakers were so incensed by one Iowa State University staff member’s speech about the shooting that they outright dismissed the possibility of a lawsuit.
The past two years have exposed a fundamental tension in higher education. Most universities are committed to both diversity and free speech, yet many are unable to cope with the social consequences of passionate disagreement.
As protests over Israel and Gaza spread across campuses, administrators called for a return to civility, as though civility were a switch that could be flipped back on. But the confusion, anger, and institutional paralysis that followed suggest that universities aren’t just struggling to maintain civility on campus; they have no consensus about what civility requires.
A group of students and professors at public universities across Alabama are asking an appeals court to halt a state law that bans diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in public schools and prohibits the endorsement of what Republican lawmakers dubbed “divisive concepts” related to race and gender.
The Alabama measure, which took effect in October 2024, is part of a wave of proposals from Republican lawmakers across the country taking aim at DEI programs on college campuses.
J.D. Tuccille
Reason
Of all the stupid ideas that have emerged in recent years, there may be none worse than the insistence that unwelcome words are the same as violence. This false perception equates physical acts that can injure or kill people with disagreements and insults that might cause hurt feelings and potentially justifies responding to the latter with the former.
After all, if words are violence, why not rebut a verbal sparring partner with an actual punch? Unfortunately, the idea is embedded on college campuses where a majority of undergraduate students agree that words and violence can be the same thing.
EmmaWhitford
Inside Higher Ed
As promised in a memo from the chancellor earlier this month, some Texas Tech University system faculty members were asked this week to report whether any course they teach “advocates for or promotes” specific race, gender or sexual identities. It is the latest step in a sweeping curricular review focused on limiting discussion of transgender identity, racism and sexuality across the five-campus public system.
Emma Whitford
Inside Higher Ed
The University of Oklahoma put a lecturer on administrative leave last week for allegedly exercising “viewpoint discrimination” five days after a different instructor was placed on leave for alleged religious discrimination.
Kelli Alvarez, an assistant teaching professor focused on race and ethnicity in literature and film, allegedly encouraged students to miss her English composition class to attend a protest in support of Mel Curth, a graduate teaching assistant in the psychology department who was removed from teaching after a student filed a religious discrimination complaint against her. Alvarez said she would excuse the absences of students who attended the protest. But according to university officials, she did not extend the same offer to students who intended to miss class that day to “express a counter-viewpoint.”
