National Free Speech News & Commentary

Maryclaire Dale
Associated Press

Excerpt: Pro-Palestinian faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have sued the Ivy League school to stop it from sending sensitive internal material to a congressional committee investigating antisemitism on campus — a probe they call “a new form of McCarthyism.”

Professor Huda Fakhreddine and other members of Penn Faculty for Justice in Palestine fear the school is poised to send files, emails, student records and other material to Congress, putting both their safety and academic freedom at risk.

Ilya Somin
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Notre Dame law Professor Derek Muller—a leading election law scholar—has posted a study he conducted of the partisan distribution of political donations by law professors between 2017 and 2023. Not surprisingly, they skew overwhelmingly towards Democratic candidates.

The overall result here is far from surprising. Lots of previous studies find that law professors are skew towards the political left. Still, the extent of the imbalance is notable. Exclusively Democratic contributors outnumber exclusively Republican ones by over 35 to 1. That's a larger disproportion than in previous studies.

Erin Gretzinger
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: The newsletter seemed innocuous. In January, the chief diversity officer at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine kicked off her “Monthly Diversity Digest” with a list of nearby events for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Then Sherita Hill Golden outlined a “diversity word of the month”: privilege. “Privilege is a set of unearned benefits given to people who are in a specific social group,” Golden wrote. “Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural and institutional levels, and it provides advantages and favors to members of dominant groups at the expense of members of other groups.” Administrators and faculty members have been parroting similar definitions for years. This time, however, it struck a nerve online.

Greg Lukianoff and Sean Stevens
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack

Excerpt: Last week, we shared the alarming data coming out of FIRE’s new Campus Deplatforming Database to show just how bad the effects of violent protests and heckler’s vetoes on campus free speech really are. This week, we’ll address the skepticism about the “campus free speech crisis” dating back to 2018.

The crux of the “new dynamic” hypothesis is this: Do we have data supporting the claim that a significant portion of college students have become more hostile toward free speech than previous generations? According to FIRE’s new Campus Deplatforming Database (last updated Feb. 29, 2024), the answer is yes.

Mary Whitfill Roeloffs
Forbes

Excerpt: The New York Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit in Manhattan on behalf of a pair of pro-Palestinian student groups that were suspended last fall after their protests pushing for a cease-fire in Gaza allegedly violated university policy—as tension over the Israel-Hamas war spills onto campuses and causes some donors to withdraw support of legacy schools.

Emily Nayyer, Sean Stevens
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Excerpt: Cancel Culture is getting worse. As FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff has pointed out many times, more college faculty have been fired during the nine-and-a-half years (and counting) of Cancel Culture, which FIRE defines as roughly starting in 2014 and accelerating past 2017, than lost their jobs during the Red Scare of the 1950s. But who is driving this anti-speech trend on college campuses?

One recent study has pinned the blame on older faculty, but FIRE has its doubts.