Trustee Responsibility Free Speech

Liam Knox
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will not renew the contract of a professor whose classes they recorded without his permission, university media relations director Beth Lutz confirmed.

Larry Chavis has taught economics at the university’s Kenan-Flagler Business School on a yearly contract since 2006. In April, he was notified that his classes had been secretly recorded by a camera in his lecture hall, and that footage of those lessons had been used in a professional review. The review was prompted by “reports concerning class content and conduct … over the past few months,” associate dean Christian Lundblad wrote in a letter to Chavis.

Lawrence D. Bobo
The Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: Having witnessed the appallingly rough manner in which prominent affiliates, including one former University president, publicly denounced Harvard’s students and present leadership, this first question must be answered: Is it outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct for a faculty member to excoriate University leadership, faculty, staff, or students with the intent to arouse external intervention into University business? And does the broad publication of such views cross a line into sanctionable violations of professional conduct?

Yes it is and yes it does.

Jonathan H. Adler
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Professor Lawrence Bobo, Dean of Social Science and the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, has an article in the Harvard Crimson on the proper limits of faculty speech that has to be read to be believed.

Douglas Soule
Tallahassee Democrat

Excerpt: An attorney representing education officials appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis Friday told a federal appeals court that Florida lawmakers, if they so choose, can prohibit professors from criticizing the governor in the classroom.

“In the classroom, the professor’s speech is the government’s speech, and the government can restrict professors on a content-wide basis and restrict them from offering viewpoints that are contrary,” said Charles Cooper of the Cooper & Kirk law firm, responding to a judge posing that scenario.

Liam Knox
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Almost as soon as the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action last June, Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey fired off a response. Within hours of the rulings in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill cases (SFFA), Bailey ordered the state’s public colleges and universities to comply—which in his view meant removing race-conscious policies “not just [in] college admissions, but also scholarships,” an extrapolation that many legal experts say is unnecessary.

University officials quickly began amending institutional grants and scholarships across the system’s four campuses, according to Christian Basi, the Missouri system’s director of public affairs. Since then, they’ve worked methodically to bring other awards in line—including endowed scholarships that donors specified should go only to members of certain racial or ethnic groups.

Zach Kessel
National Review

Excerpt: Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Harvard University leaders issued a statement professing to be “heartbroken” over the October 7 Hamas massacre and expressing hope that the university could play a role in fostering dialogue around the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

That statement — roundly criticized as lacking moral clarity —  contrasted sharply with the righteous indignation the university displayed in response to the 2016 presidential election, the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, the killing of George Floyd, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those statements, of course, drew furious criticism from Americans who don’t happen to share the political commitments common in Cambridge.