National Free Speech News & Commentary

Abigail Anthony
National Review

Excerpt: Columbia University president Minouche Shafik condemned the “intimidating and harassing behavior” that has occurred on the New York City campus over the past several days and announced that classes would be held remotely on Monday.

“Antisemitic language, like any other language that is used to hurt and frighten people, is unacceptable and appropriate action will be taken,” Shafik said in a statement. She further suggested that “tensions have been exploited and amplified by individuals who are not affiliated with Columbia who have come to campus to pursue their own agendas.”

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: A recent announcement from The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) tells us something we knew was coming: the Biden Administration is walking back the improvements in Title IX made by Betsy DeVos. (Yes, it was one of the few good things done under Trump.) The original rules, which bear on how colleges adjudicate sexual misconduct, were put in place by Obama, then rolled back and made more fair by DeVos, and now Biden’s reverting the law to the Obama standards, which are palpably unfair because they take away rights from the accused that are in place in real courts.

Yolanda Wang, Yurii Stasiuk, and Tristan Hernandez
Yale Daily News

Excerpt: Early Saturday morning, the Yale Corporation — the University’s highest governing body, which includes 16 trustees as well as University President Peter Salovey — convened at the Greenberg Conference Center for their last meeting before the summer recess.

The Yale Corporation meeting comes the morning after pro-divestment protesters stayed overnight on Beinecke Plaza with an encampment of more than 25 tents. The encampment followed a mass protest during Salovey’s farewell dinner in the Schwarzman Center last night, and a week-long effort by various students and groups to occupy the plaza. The Corporation — which is in charge of the search for Yale’s 24th president — is also in the eighth month of its search but has not shared a timeline for when the decision will be made. Salovey is set to step down on June 30.

Sherman Criner
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Excerpt: According to a recent Axios poll, Republican and Democratic college students agree that campuses must broaden free speech “even if there’s some risk of violence.” Moreover, roughly 77 percent of respondents said that free speech “should be protected” regardless of whether someone finds it “deeply upsetting.”

In a time when safe spaces and censorship dominate our universities’ political discourse, some may find this bipartisan support for free speech surprising. After all, other recent polls have illustrated how Republicans and Democrats vehemently disagree on fundamental questions, such as the necessity of political correctness and whether hate speech even exists.

Will Bardenwerper
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Excerpt: The article was so bizarre I thought it might be an April Fool’s hoax, given the April 1 byline. The author of “We must not let eating clubs be ideological safe spaces” in The Daily Princetonian had invited a prominent Princeton professor to join him as a guest for lunch at his “eating club” (essentially a private club serving as hybrid dining hall and fraternity/sorority for Princeton juniors and seniors). He later learned that a “group of membership” felt “caught off guard” when they saw the professor, and they were deeply upset by his presence.

If our future leaders are coddled to the point that they cannot share a dining room with an accomplished professor with whom they disagree, where does that leave us as a country? What good comes from four years spent reinforcing the ideas one arrived on campus with?

Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic

Excerpt: This month, Professor Randall L. Kennedy, an eminent scholar of race and civil rights, published an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson denouncing the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in academic hiring. “I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice,” he wrote. “The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince.” But a “contrasting perspective” on diversity statements that the Crimson published argued that “furor over diversity statements in hiring is a red herring.”

But people who see the flaws of the status quo should not be seduced by the illusion that tweaking how DEI statements are solicited or scored is a solution. In fact, interviewing Hall, the ostensible reformer in the Harvard Crimson debate, left me more convinced that abolishing DEI statements is the best way forward.