National Free Speech News & Commentary

Kathryn Palmer
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Nearly six months after the Israel-Hamas war unleashed a steady tide of student-led protests on college campuses across the United States, Indiana’s public flagship university is emerging as a free speech battleground.

The latest dispute is over the abrupt cancellation of a long-planned art exhibition at Indiana University at Bloomington’s Eskenazi Museum of Art, Samia Halaby: Centers of Energy. Halaby is an internationally recognized Palestinian American abstract artist. Critics of the decision think there’s more to the story. And while they don’t know the specific factors driving the decision, they can’t ignore the pressure IU administrators have been under since Indiana congressman Jim Banks threatened to withhold federal funding from the university if they don’t adequately address perceived antisemitism on campus.

Yascha Mounk
The Good Fight Podcast, Persuasion, Substack

Excerpt: Larry Summers is an economist, the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School, and a member of the board of directors of OpenAI. Summers is the former President of Harvard University, the former Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton, and was a director of the National Economic Council under Barack Obama.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Larry Summers discuss how universities can re-commit to pursuing truth and protecting academic freedom; how current economic indicators contrast with how many people actually experience the economy; and how Biden can improve his odds for re-election.

Editorial Board
Case Western Reserve Observer

Excerpt: When it comes to the First Amendment, many people tend to forget that it was not meant to protect you from public scrutiny—it is meant to protect you from tyrannical governments. And currently, the United States’ government is acting less and less concerned about adhering to this amendment’s core tenets.

Greg Lukianoff and Adam Goldstein
The Eternally Radical Idea

Excerpt: Greg appeared on the PBS NewsHour last week to debate the pluses and minuses of the DEI bureaucracy on campus. Taking the “pro” DEI office position was Dr. Shaun Harper, Founder and Executive Director of the USC Race and Equity center — and someone you may recall from Greg’s appearance on the Dr. Phil program in 2022.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: In an echo of last year, state lawmakers in different parts of the country are pushing bills that would diminish tenure protections and target diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Indiana’s Republican-dominated state Senate wants to do both at once. Earlier this month it passed a bill that takes aim at both tenure and DEI in public colleges and universities, tying them together with language that shifts focus from racial or other notions of diversity toward what it calls “intellectual diversity.” Senate Bill 202, now being debated in the majority-Republican state House of Representatives, defines that term as “multiple, divergent, and varied scholarly perspectives on an extensive range of public policy issues.”

Megan Zahneis
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Public colleges in Idaho would have to close offices and centers that do diversity, equity, and inclusion work if a Republican-backed bill introduced last week is enacted.

But, in a shift from the other bills targeting DEI measures that The Chronicle is tracking, the Idaho legislation also lists three dozen examples of specific jobs at Boise State and Idaho State Universities and at the University of Idaho that would be prohibited upon its passage.