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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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When news of Iván Chaar López’s tenure denial broke last month, the scholar’s supporters pointed to what they believed was the University of Texas at Austin’s unstated reason: politics.
In a move that I find completely and utterly shocking, but not truly unexpected, the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education staff list is now offline. Try to access it and you get a simple message: “You are not authorized to access this page.”
The American Association of University Professors sued Texas A&M University officials and the system Board of Regents last week to block a policy that limits discussion of “race or gender ideology” in class unless preapproved by the institution’s president.
