Trustee Responsibility Free Speech

Yascha Mounk
Yascha Mounk Substack

Excerpt: Plenty of arguments against free speech lack any credible pretense of sophistication. They simply jump from the undoubted fact that many people say dumb or disgusting things on the internet to the understandable, if wrong-headed, wish that anybody who says such things should be made to shut up. But those who argue for restrictions on free speech with an ounce of sophistication have increasingly begun to invoke an idea by a philosopher whose work they otherwise studiously ignore: Karl Popper and his “paradox of tolerance.”

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Post-tenure reviews aren’t a new phenomenon in higher education. The American Association of University Professors has had a stance on them going back to 1983, and in 1999 it released a report saying they should be for “faculty development” and not “undertaken for the purpose of dismissal.”

Now, the first round of post-tenure reviews has been completed. And the flagship University of Florida’s process produced a figure that has raised eyebrows among its faculty: About one-fifth of reviewed professors failed to pass muster or gave up defending their tenure.

Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack

Excerpt: I recently appeared on “Plain English with Derek Thompson” to discuss “The Coddling of the American Mind” and how what Tim Urban calls “social justice fundamentalism,” otherwise called “wokeness,” affects mental health. Readers will recall my May 21 ERI post with my FIRE colleague Andrea Lan where we delved into the data on this.

As I mentioned on X recently, the reactions to the episode have ranged from thoughtful and interesting to the unsurprising assertions of, “My side is happy because we're better people. Your side is miserable because you're terrible people,” and, “My side is miserable because we actually see the world accurately. Your side is happy because you're selfish monsters.”

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Over the past two years, lawmakers in at least 10 states have pushed legislation that would weaken—or outright eliminate—tenure in public colleges and universities. With the exception of a Democratic state senator in Hawai’i, these bills have all been pushed by Republicans in states such as Texas where the party controls the Legislature.

Despite these proposals, no state has actually gone through with fully banning tenure from its public colleges and universities. The bills that would’ve done so either failed to pass or were watered down before passage after facing opposition from faculty members, who stress that tenure protects academic freedom, including for conservatives, and from university leaders, who say it helps recruit professors who could make more outside academe.

Justo Atonio Triana
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Growing up in Cuba, I had to measure with surgical precision each of my words at school, knowing they could possibly be deemed “problematic,” meaning “counterrevolutionary,” meaning I — or worse, my family — could get in serious trouble for what I said.

Arriving in the United States in 2019, I again found myself self-censoring in a classroom.

Tom Perkins and Will Craft
The Guardian

Excerpt: As antisemitism hearings on college campuses ignited late last year, US representatives Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx seized the spotlight, relentlessly attacking Harvard, Columbia and other top universities, portraying them as unsafe and incompetent.

A little-considered group of Stefanik and Foxx political allies and donors quietly benefited: the “for-profit” college industry.