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FIRE Intern
FIRE
Universities don’t have to choose between protecting Jewish students and championing freedom of speech. In fact, federal law requires them to do both. Yet when my alma mater, Brown University, resolved a federal civil rights investigation in July 2025, the line between protected speech and unprotected conduct was unnecessarily blurred.
The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights had been investigating Brown’s handling of alleged antisemitism on campus after the October 7 attacks on Israel in 2023. Brown maintained it had complied with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Had OCR found Brown in violation, it could have pulled federal funding from the university. The voluntary resolution agreement let Brown end the investigation while claiming to uphold its commitments to academic freedom.
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The early nineteenth century was a formative era for American higher education, a time when colleges were fragile, small-scale institutions, often caught between their colonial legacies and populist hostility to privileged elites studying the liberal arts.
These tensions came to a head in the case Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, which helped to establish the independence of American higher education from governmental control. At issue was the very nature of a college. Is it a public utility, subject to the demands of the state? Or is it a self-governing institution whose autonomy deserves constitutional protection?
Daniel Diermeier has become one of the most visible college leaders. The chancellor of Vanderbilt University joined a panel Thursday in Washington, D.C., to make his case for rebuilding public trust — by taking politics out of research and the classroom, and restraining institutions from issuing statements on matters not directly related to their mission or operations.
After Thursday’s discussion at the Reagan Institute Summit on Education — an event that provided largely supportive views of his positions — Diermeier talked with The Chronicle about politicization in higher education, attempts to limit academic freedom, and why he’s publicly pushing so hard for reforms to higher education while working quietly behind the scenes with federal officials.
Being at Yale over the past two years gives me an interesting perch. From here I can watch the capitulation of a once-great institution in real time. It gives me an inside view of what must have gone down at the law firms, tech companies and the other universities that have bent the knee to the orange menace.
And things are doubleplusgood at Yale these days. Earlier this month, Yale College scheduled a mandatory lecture (officially, a “conversation”) for all first-year students, on the university and democracy. Let’s set aside the curious nature of insisting that all who have just arrived on Yale’s campus must get the “official” story about this place and its role in the world as it is in 2026, even before they’ve set foot in a classroom.
