Trustee Responsibility Free Speech

David Bernstein
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Dear Friends,

We, the undersigned Jewish scholars and academics, are concerned about the current ideological environment in the US and elsewhere and the increasingly censorious culture in many institutions of higher learning. Although we are acutely aware of the illiberalism and threats to academic freedom emanating from the political right, and in no way downplay these dangers, in this letter we focus our attention on, and express our deep concern about, a dangerously intolerant ideology on the political left that has taken hold in academia.

María Luisa Paúl
Washington Post

Excerpt: A teacher was fired Wednesday by the Waukesha, Wis., school board after she publicly criticized school administrators’ decision to prohibit her first-grade class from singing a song about rainbows earlier this year.

Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: A women’s soccer coach at Geneva College, a Christian institution in Pennsylvania, was fired in June for posting messages supporting the LGBTQ community on her Instagram page, Religion News Service reported.

The coach, Kelsey Morrison, identifies as gay but was celibate, allowing her to remain within the university’s conduct code, which forbids “sexual immorality” including “homosexual behavior.” She had coached at Geneva for two years.

Stephanie Saul
New York Times

Excerpt: Kathleen McElroy, who had recently served as the director of the University of Texas’s School of Journalism, was thrilled to embark on a new assignment: running a similar program at her alma mater, Texas A&M University.

Quickly, though, things started to unravel. Dr. McElroy, who once worked as an editor at The New York Times, said she was notified by the university’s interim dean of liberal arts, José Luis Bermúdez, of political pushback over her appointment.

Greg Sargent
Washington Post

Excerpt: In recent weeks, plaintiffs who are suing to invalidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “Stop Woke Act” have been confronting its defenders with a seemingly loaded question: Would the law, which restricts school discussion of race, prohibit a public university professor from endorsing affirmative action in a classroom setting?

Surprisingly, lawyers defending the DeSantis administration just answered this question with a qualified “yes.” Which exposes a core truth about his anti-woke directives: They really do constitute efforts at state censorship, not just of concepts he likes to call “woke indoctrination” but also of viewpoints that are contested yet remain squarely within mainstream academic discourse.

Judith Friedlander
Persuasion

Excerpt: This is hardly the first time in the history of American higher education that elected politicians have threatened the autonomy of academic institutions and the future of academic freedom. Nor is it the first time that opposing factions on college and university campuses have battled over the meaning of academic freedom.