Trustee Responsibility Free Speech

Jonathan Sumption
Unherd

Excerpt: Freedom of expression is probably the most widely acknowledged human right in the world. Lip service is paid to it even in totalitarian states. Freedom of expression is not worth much in Russia or North Korea, but their constitutions guarantee it in very similar terms as the United Nations. And yet, it is today under greater threat than any other human right. This is happening even, perhaps especially, in liberal democracies. How are we to explain this paradox?

Nell Gluckman
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: When Indiana’s abortion ban took effect, in the fall of 2022, Tamara Kay, a tenured professor in the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, tweeted that she was prepared to help students get access to health care. She hung a sign on her office door with her personal email address and a similar message.

About a month later, The Irish Rover, a student publication that says its mission is to uphold Notre Dame’s Roman Catholic identity, published an article about Kay titled “Keough School Professor Offers Abortion Access to Students.” A subhead read: “Abortion assistance offered to students despite IN law, ND policy.” In the days before the Rover article appeared, a business-school professor texted a student reporter that “there needs to be a coordinated assault on the Tamara Kay issue.”

Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic

Excerpt: Late last month, the chancellor of Florida’s university system, acting in consultation with Governor Ron DeSantis, ordered state universities to deactivate all local chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine.

How could dissolving student groups be lawful, given constitutional protections for free speech and freedom of association? Although multiple local SJP chapters acted as apologists for the murders of Israeli civilians or stood in solidarity with the Hamas militants who killed and kidnapped children, even viewpoints that deplorable are entitled to First Amendment protection. But Florida says it is not targeting the protected speech of these groups. It is acting, instead, because the national SJP has run afoul of a state law against providing “material support” to a terrorist organization.

Jesse Wegman
New York Times
 
Excerpt: It was a relief to learn of the arrest last week of a 21-year-old Cornell University student for threatening to rape and murder Jews on campus in reaction to the Israel-Hamas war. It was also an easy case: Violent threats against specific people are illegal, and they are dealt with by the justice system, not school administrators.

Richard Corcoran
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Anti-Semitism has reared its ugly head at Harvard. Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of some 1,400 Israelis, Jewish students there have reportedly been bullied, intimidated, spat on and, in at least one case, physically assaulted. Student-led protests call for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people with chants of “Intifada! Intifada! Intifada!” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free!”

Bret Stephens
New York Times

Excerpt: There used to be a sign (which, for all I know, is still there) somewhere in the C.I.A.’s headquarters that read, “Every day is Sept. 12.” It was placed there to remind the agency’s staffers that what they felt right after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — the sense of outrage and purpose, of favoring initiative over caution, of taking nothing for granted — had to be the mind-set with which they arrived to work every day.