National Free Speech News & Commentary

Megan Zahneis
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Utah has become the sixth state to adopt legislation that limits diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at public colleges, after Gov. Spencer J. Cox, a Republican, on Tuesday signed a sweeping measure into law. The bill passed by wide party-line margins in both the House and Senate, and earned Cox’s signature just two weeks after its introduction; that fast pace drew criticism last week from Utah’s top higher-education official.

The bill is the first targeting DEI to be signed into law this year, after seven bills in five states became law in 2023, according to The Chronicle’s tracker. At least 16 states will consider restrictions on campus DEI this year.

Martin Di Caro
Washington Times

Excerpt: The uproar over free expression and antisemitism on college campuses is evoking a controversy from the late 1970s that left a lasting mark on First Amendment case law and provided an enduring lesson on the importance of free speech in a democratic society.

In this episode, Nico Perrino of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) reflects on why Skokie matters at a time of increasing hostility to free expression across the American political spectrum. Mr. Perrino co-directed the documentary Mighty Ira about Ira Glasser, who led the ACLU for 23 years after the intense backlash over its role in the Skokie case.

Stephanie Saul
New York Times

Excerpt: Campus protests are not usually aimed at a single person. But last week at the University of Pennsylvania, professors staged a rally targeting Marc Rowan, the New York private-equity billionaire. A Penn alumnus and a major benefactor of the university, Mr. Rowan deployed his formidable resources in a relentless campaign against Penn’s president, M. Elizabeth Magill, leading to her resignation in December.

But it was what happened next that spurred the protest. Mr. Rowan sent a four-page email to university trustees titled “Moving Forward,” which many professors interpreted as a blueprint for a more conservative campus. Amy C. Offner, a history professor who led the protest, called the document a proposed “hostile takeover of the core academic functions of the university.”

Eugene Volokh
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: An excerpt from an opinion piece that she wrote at the Washington Post Dec. 10, but that I had missed:

    I was one of three co-chairs of Harvard's Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, which in 2018 delivered a strategic framework for the campus…. Across the country, DEI bureaucracies have been responsible for numerous assaults on common sense, but the values of lowercase-i inclusion and lowercase-d diversity remain foundational to healthy democracy….

    We wrote [in our report]: "Our shared pursuits … depend on the open and direct expression of ideas and on criteria of evaluation established by the judgments of experts. Excellence therefore also requires academic freedom. Inclusion and academic freedom — these principles are linked in each being necessary to the pursuit of truth."

Jeannie Suk Gersen
New Yorker

Excerpt: On January 2nd, after months of turmoil around Harvard’s response to Hamas’s attack on Israel, and weeks of turmoil around accusations of plagiarism, Claudine Gay resigned as the university’s president. Any hope that this might relieve the outsized attention on Harvard proved to be illusory. The week after Gay stepped down, two congressional committees demanded documents and explanations from Harvard, on topics ranging from antisemitism, free speech, discrimination, and discipline, to admissions, donations, budgets, and legal settlements.

Some at Harvard might say this is a crisis sparked by external forces: the government, donors, and the public. But it developed long before Gay became president and won’t end with her fall. Over time, Harvard, like many other universities, has allowed the core academic mission of research, intellectual inquiry, and teaching to be subordinated to other values that, though important, should never have been allowed to work against it.

John O. McGinnis
Law & Liberty

Excerpt: The resignation of Claudine Gay provides a window into many pathologies of elite universities—antisemitism on campus, the prioritization of DEI over merit, and plagiarism among academics. But it also reflects their poor governance.

Governance at elite universities is insular, unaccountable, and marred by conflicts of interest that prevent it from being focused on the historic mission of the university, encapsulated on Harvard’s coat of arms: seeking truth. Many nonprofits face similar structural difficulties that create a gap between the performance of their leadership and the fulfillment of their mission, but elite universities face added difficulties.