National Free Speech News & Commentary

Melanie Wilcox
Campus Reform

Excerpt: Penn State University canceled Riley Gaines’ speech that was supposed to occur Tuesday, Oct. 10, just a month after president Neeli Bendapudi said that the school was “bound by the First Amendment.”

Germania Rodriguez Poleo
Dailymail.com

Harvard President Emeritus Larry Summers says he is 'sickened' by Ivy League school's response to attacks on Israel after 31 organizations said the country was 'entirely responsible'
Harvard's President Emeritus Larry Summers has said he is 'sickened' by the Ivy League school's response to Hamas' terror attack on Israel after 31 organizations claimed the Jewish nation was 'entirely responsible'. Summers, who is Jewish and led Harvard University from 2001-2006, reacted to the prestigious school's lack of official response to the atrocity, as well as to a letter claiming Hamas' attacks  'did not happen in a vacuum. . . . We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,' the groups wrote.

Summers, who also served in the Obama administration, addressed the school, tweeting: '"In nearly 50 years of affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today. The silence from Harvard's leadership, so far, coupled with a vocal and widely reported student groups' statement blaming Israel solely, has allowed Harvard to appear at best neutral towards acts of terror against the Jewish state of Israel."

The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities AAUP Chapter
Academe Blog

Excerpt: The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) deplores Hamline University leadership’s continued misrepresentation of its 2022 violation of the principle of academic freedom.  

Unfortunately, Hamline administrators have failed to learn from their mishandling of this case; rather than recommit to the principle of academic freedom, they have affirmed their disregard for it.

Greg Childress
NC Newsline

Excerpt: America’s educators must not cower before lawmakers attempting to restrict what they teach students about America’s racial history, author and education reformer Lisa Delpit told hundreds of teachers attending the annual Color of Education summit in Raleigh on Saturday.

Delpit, the author of the groundbreaking book, “Multiplication Is for White People” said teachers must engage in the kind of “fugitive pedagogy” that educators used during the Jim Crow era to get around mandated curricula that hid the truth about America’s racist past and the enormous contributions Black people have made to the nation.

Ben Slivka
Minding the Campus

Excerpt: One year ago, I attended a pre-football game tailgate party on the Saturday of my 40th reunion weekend in Evanston, Illinois. Students at the party later complained about my words, and Northwestern University (NU) canceled me without speaking to me.

I escalated to the President, the General Counsel, the Chair, and the Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees. Despite my more than 7,000 volunteer hours and over seven million dollars in donations—NU has not apologized, has not rescinded my cancellation, and (I presume) continues to trample the free speech and due process rights of other Wildcats.

Meghan Cox Gurdon
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: We’re in a terrible spot, and everybody knows it. Americans on the right and left detest each other, excoriate each other and, with every flaring of rage, move further from any sense of pluralistic common cause. Citizens have lost confidence in officialdom. Fashionable ideologies that brook no good-faith dissent have surged into every corner of life. Make a minor demurral, even a joke, and you risk being subjected to the ghastly nullification rituals of what is called cancel culture.

It is this predicament, all of it, that Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott address in “The Canceling of the American Mind,” a lucid and comprehensive look at where we are and how we got here, and, less persuasively, what we can do to make things better.