Trustee Responsibility Free Speech

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is True

Excerpt: At many colleges, submitting SAT test scores for admissions has been eliminated or made optional—often during the pandemic—under the assumption that giving scores would disadvantage racial minorities, who don’t test as well as do white or Asian applicants. This was a way to achieve diversity—a way to enact “holistic admissions.”  Even though SAT scores were good predictors not only of college achievement, and of later-life success, measures of potential achievement were considered less important than indices of diversity.

Now the highly-rated Dartmouth College in New Hampshire has done a similar study, found the same correlative predication as did the UC system, and has reinstated the requirement for SATs, something it made optional during the pandemic.

Joe Killian
NC Newsline

Excerpt: The climate for free speech and expression on North Carolina’s college campuses is good and improving, according to a new report from the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The group, whose work is frequently cited by campus trustees and members of the UNC System Board of Governors, gave 14 of the system’s 16 university campuses its highest “green light” rating in its new report.

Caitlin Flanagan
The Atlantic

Excerpt:  If you’ve taken a college tour lately, either as an applicant or as the parent of an applicant, you may have noticed that at some point—usually as you’re on the death march from the aquatic center to the natural-sciences complex—the tour guide will spin smartly on her heel, do the college-tour-guide thing of performatively walking backwards, and let you in on something very important. “What’s different about College X,” she’ll say confidently, “is that our professors don’t teach you what to think. They teach you how to think.”

Randall L. Kennedy
The Harvard Crimson

Nearly forty years ago, then-University President Derek C. Bok wrote an open letter championing a libertarian ethos of free speech at Harvard that would satisfy even its most ardent defenders. His views, he noted, were “in keeping with the main lines of Constitutional thought. . . . Despite recognizing that Harvard is a private institution and thus outside the sweep of the First Amendment, Bok nevertheless maintained that Harvard should not “have less free speech than the surrounding society — or than a public university.” . . .  

The Harvard community, however, ought not be doctrinaire in its reliance on the First Amendment. Harvard should govern speech on campus according to a separate standard anchored solely by academic concerns . . . . For example, if Harvard were bound by the First Amendment, the University would be compelled to permit students to chant, in the middle of Harvard Yard, “no means yes, and yes means anal” or “send the Blacks back to Africa”or “exterminate the Jews!” — all phrases that, standing alone, are protected when uttered in a public space like Cambridge Common or the quad at the University of Massachusetts. . . . Ought Harvard be so permissive?

Heterodox Academy Podcast
John Tomasi & Steven Pinker

Excerpt: Are our higher education institutions still nurturing true
intellectual diversity? Our guest today is Steven Pinker, a cognitive
scientist at Harvard, and today, we'll be exploring the growing
concerns within higher ed that institutions are turning into echo
chambers, stifling dissent and censoring certain perspectives.

In this thought-provoking episode, we'll be discovering the challenges
to academic freedom in the era of cancel culture. We'll explore how
questioning a consensus can now come at a cost, impacting the pursuit
of truth within academic institutions. We'll also uncover the story of
the Council for Academic Freedom at Harvard, which was formed to
combat these challenges.

Martin Di Caro
Washington Times

Excerpt: The uproar over free expression and antisemitism on college campuses is evoking a controversy from the late 1970s that left a lasting mark on First Amendment case law and provided an enduring lesson on the importance of free speech in a democratic society.

In this episode, Nico Perrino of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) reflects on why Skokie matters at a time of increasing hostility to free expression across the American political spectrum. Mr. Perrino co-directed the documentary Mighty Ira about Ira Glasser, who led the ACLU for 23 years after the intense backlash over its role in the Skokie case.