Trustee Responsibility Free Speech

Eugene Volokh
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: A very interesting new article, by Profs. James L. Gibson (Wash. U.) and Joseph L. Sutherland (Emory). What struck me is the magnitude of the felt lack of freedom among the three most moderate segments, even setting aside the different reactions on the extremes:

And here's an excerpt from the introduction to the article: “While some might understand these data to indicate that those with ‘bad’ views are no longer free to express themselves, which may be a good thing, we have no means of discerning whether the speech lost is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ speech. Owing to the benefits of deliberations among citizens for democratic politics, most democratic theorists would regard these results as too important to ignore…”

Jessie Appleby and Graham Piro
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Free speech fallout continues from the disastrous congressional testimony on campus anti-Semitism given earlier this month by the presidents of Penn, MIT, and Harvard. Now, at least three other elite universities have announced that calls for genocide would violate their policies. Last week, FIRE wrote Stanford University, Columbia University, and Yale University, urging them to forgo revising their policies to punish speech that allegedly calls for genocide, because such an overbroad rule risks prohibiting protected speech including hyperbole, satire, or ambiguous language.

Keith E. Whittington
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: On December 12, I participated in a timely panel discussion at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study on "Free Speech, Political Speech, and Hate Speech on Campus." The panel included Jeannie Suk Gersen, Nadine Strossen, and Erica Chenoweth, and was moderated by Tomiko Brown-Nagin.

Ben Sasse
The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (originally printed in The Atlantic).

Excerpt: In the spring of 1994, the top executives of the seven largest tobacco companies testified under oath before Congress that nicotine is not addictive. Nearly 30 years later, Americans remember their laughable claims, their callous indifference, their lawyerly inability to speak plainly, and the general sense that they did not regard themselves as part of a shared American community. Those pampered executives, behaving with such Olympian detachment, put the pejorative big in Big Tobacco.

Last week, something similar happened. Thirty years from now, Americans will likely recall a witness table of presidents—representing not top corporations in one single sector, but the nation’s most powerful educational institutions—refusing to speak plainly, defiantly rejecting any sense that they are part of a “we,” and exhibiting smug moralistic certainty even as they embraced bizarrely immoral positions about anti-Semitism and genocide.

Jessica Wills
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Excerpt: Faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania are concerned that free expression and viewpoint diversity may disappear completely from their university.  After a tense congressional hearing in which then-President Liz Magill said the university would not punish many forms of constitutionally protected speech — including anti-Semitic speech — Magill backtracked the next day via a video apology in which she signaled her willingness to abandon constitutional standards for free speech. Shortly afterward, she resigned.

In the wake of this shakeup, the future of free speech at Penn is far from certain. Others, however, would like to see the school revive its commitment to free speech. In that spirit, some faculty members drafted a “New Constitution for the University of Pennsylvania,” a vision for the university which calls Penn to recommit itself to intellectual diversity, institutional neutrality, and open discourse.

Vimal Patel
New York Times

Excerpt: The toppling of the University of Pennsylvania’s president, Elizabeth Magill — four days after her testimony before Congress on whether to punish students if they called for genocide — was a victory for those who believe that pro-Palestinian protesters have gone too far in their speech.

For many longtime observers of the campus speech wars, however, this moment is a dire one for freedom of expression.