Trustee Responsibility Free Speech

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley’s Blog

Excerpt: In my new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I write about a global anti-free speech movement that is now sweeping over the United States. While not the first, it is in my view the most dangerous movement in our history due to an unprecedented alliance of government, corporate, academic, and media forces. That fear was amplified this week with polling showing that years of attacking free speech as harmful has begun to change the views of citizens.

Michael T. Nietzel
Forbes

Excerpt: Only 36% of Americans believe that higher education “is fine” as it is now, a five percentage-point decline from just a year ago. That’s one of the top-line findings of a new survey released this week by New America, the progressive think tank.

Americans’ growing unhappiness with the current state of higher education was also revealed by the fact that in 2024 73% of them believed that higher ed offers a good return on investment, down from 82% who felt that way in 2017. In addition, only 54% of Americans think that higher education is having a positive impact on the way things are going in the country today, a 16 percentage-point drop since 2019.

Dear ACTA friend,

Since its founding, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has advocated for strengthening civic education at America’s colleges and universities. Our democratic republic depends on an educated citizenry—the rising generation must have a robust understanding of our nation’s history and system of government.

Our country is facing a civic knowledge crisis, and with it, a crisis of civic order. ACTA’s recent survey, Losing America’s Memory 2.0, has brought to light some startling findings about the state of civic literacy among college students. Most students are unable to identify the speaker of the House of Representatives, term lengths for members of Congress, or the branch of government with the power to declare war.

Bret Stephens
New York Times

Excerpt: On its face, there’s nothing necessarily political about the mantra that the customer is always right. It can buck up the patience of an exasperated shopkeeper dealing with a finicky patron or push complacent manufacturers to think harder about evolving consumer tastes. It fosters a service culture that, as visitors to the United States often remark, is notable for its niceness.

Mark Moyar
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Last year I visited Harvard at the invitation of two organizations in whose services I had labored as a student 30 years earlier: the Republican Club and the undergraduate conservative magazine The Harvard Salient. The Salient had recently adopted a policy of publishing articles under pseudonyms because of fears that naming the authors would result in damage to their grades, social lives, and careers.

In fact, no mobs materialized to bar my path. No leftists showed up to jeer my remarks on the finer points of history and politics. My hosts explained that the opposing side never showed up to hear conservative speakers. Prior interactions had led the young rightists to conclude that their left-leaning counterparts were so certain of their rectitude that they had no interest in contrary viewpoints.

Dissident Dialogues

Excerpt: Leading academics come together to discuss and debate whether Western universities can be saved from peril. With free speech on campus in jeopardy, and weekly Palestine protests following years of attacks on curriculum and the pulling down of statues. Can they be salvaged or do new universities need to be built?