Trustee Responsibility Free Speech

Emma Camp
Reason

Excerpt: A Tennessee 10-year-old was expelled from school for a full year after he pointed his finger in the shape of a gun and made mock "machine gun" noises, according to a ProPublica investigation.

The boy was expelled as part of a "zero tolerance" law in Tennessee that mandates any student who makes a threat of "mass violence" be expelled for at least one year. While the law, originally signed in 2023—following a shooting by a former student at a private school in Nashville—was recently amended to direct schools to expel students only for "valid" threats, the provisions of the law are still vague, and schools have considerable enforcement leeway.

Niall Ferguson and Jacob Howland
The Atlantic

Excerpt: You’re in. You’ve been admitted. And soon your parents will drop you off at your new university. It’s thrilling. It’s daunting. But what will you actually be studying in your freshman year?

All universities claim to provide some kind of intellectual foundation for their students. Sadly, the reality of what freshmen and sophomores are required to study usually belies the admissions-office propaganda.

George Leef
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Excerpt: Norman Wang is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), where he has been on the faculty since 2008, specializing in cardiology. His troubles at the school began in March 2020, after he published an article in the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) entitled “Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolving Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the U.S. from 1969 to 2019.”

Shortly after the publication of Wang’s article, it came under attack from Twitter users, who denounced it as “racist.” In July 2020, UPMC officials who had been alerted to Wang’s heresies by the Twitter mob sprang into action against him. On July 31, they summoned him to a meeting with Dr. Samir Saba, chief of UPMC’s cardiology division, and Dr. Kathryn Berlacher, another faculty member, to discuss the article. Wang said that he stood firmly behind it. That could not be tolerated.

Richard K. Vedder
Independent Institute

Excerpt: For learning and discovery communities to flourish, there has to be a diversity of ideas that are explored and debated, with multiple perspectives discussed civilly by veteran scholars—the faculty—as well as inquisitive young learners—the students. While campuses in recent years have obsessed over what are intellectually relatively unimportant dimensions of diversity, such as the skin color of participants in the scholarly enterprise, they increasingly have imposed a leftist monopoly on the exploration of ideas on many campuses, including the nation’s most prestigious ones. A progressive agenda reigns, and questioning it is increasingly rare as woke leaders impose their ideas on the campus community.

Scott Alexander
Substack

Excerpt: In a recent post, I said that part of opposing cancel culture is to rigorously define it. Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, took up the challenge.

Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea

Excerpt: Two things became inevitable after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump: Some people who don’t like Trump would make edgy social media posts about it, and some people who have chafed under Cancel Culture in left-leaning spaces for the last decade would call for cancellations in response. Just as with censorship more broadly, too many folks hate it when it’s done to them but can’t wait to do it to others once they have the chance.