National Free Speech News & Commentary

Nell Gluckman
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Earlier this year, Shirin Saeidi was at a dinner with three speakers who had been invited to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville center she directs when they told her something that surprised her. As part of the paperwork that would allow them to be reimbursed and paid for the trip, they had been prompted to sign a pledge saying they were not boycotting Israel. They told her it was something they would have liked to have known about beforehand.

PEN America

Excerpt: A wave of antisemitic rhetoric, harassment, threats, vandalism and violence has rocked campuses across the U.S. as the Israel-Hamas war escalates. At Cornell University, law enforcement was called in to investigate what the university president called “a series of horrendous, antisemitic messages threatening violence” against the campus’s Jewish community that forced students into lockdown. Drexel University, a women’s restroom was reportedly defaced with antisemitic graffiti and a Jewish student’s dormitory door was set on fire. At Bates College, a swastika was drawn in a public restroom and at American University a swastika and Nazi slogan were graffitied in a student dorm.

John Tierney
City Journal

Excerpt: After Harvard student groups blamed Israel for Hamas’s atrocities, the global backlash was so fierce that the university’s president, Claudine Gay, released a video statement that in some ways proved even more puzzling. “Our university rejects the harassment or intimidation of individuals based on their beliefs,” she said. “And our university embraces a commitment to free expression. That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous.”

This was news to the scholars with unpopular views at Harvard who have been sanctioned by administrators, boycotted by students, and slandered by the Crimson student newspaper.

Richard Vedder
Minding the Campus

Excerpt: Arguably, American universities in many ways resemble somewhat unruly and disrespectful adolescents—they want to be comfortably sustained by their adult parents/financiers, but their increasingly deplorable behavior needs firmer adult supervision. Hence “outsiders” are becoming assertive, be it major donors to elite private schools or politicians at schools importantly dependent on government subsidies, especially our state universities.

By Leslie Spencer
Princetonians for Free Speech

It’s no surprise that the University of Chicago has made by far the biggest, boldest and most serious move of any university in the country to confront the crisis of free speech and academic freedom at American universities.  Chicago ranks #1 on FIRE’s survey for a reason. On October 5-6, the University of Chicago launched a new permanent entity, the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, with a ground-breaking inaugural event bringing together the country’s leading lights on the state of free speech at American universities to examine what the problem is, how we got here, and what might be done.

Johanna Alonso and Kathryn Palmer
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: In an incident that many people viewed as a troubling escalation of tensions on a college campus over the Israel-Hamas war, pro-Palestinian students banged on locked library doors while shouting “Free Palestine” at Cooper Union in New York City while Jewish students were inside the library, according to a widely circulated video of the Oct. 25 incident.