National Free Speech News & Commentary

By Holly Lawford-Smith
Quillette

Excerpt: Kathleen Stock tweeted recently that ‘Many philosophers have existed only in their own minds, but I think I may well be the first to exist only in other people’s.’ She was responding to the latest outbreak of leftist moral panic about gender-critical feminism, in this case a series of actions taken by student activists at the University of Oxford in protest against her being invited to participate in a debate hosted by the Oxford Union—which describes itself as ‘the world’s most prestigious debating society’.

By Joe Dodson
Courthouse News Service

Excerpt: A Fourth Circuit majority agreed Wednesday with a district court's determination that Virginia Tech's bias response team does not have a chilling effect on free speech.

By Todd J. Zywicki
Minding the Campus

Excerpt: Identifying the problems does not answer the more important question: what is to be done? What practical, real-world policy responses are available that might arrest, then reverse, the decline of modern American higher education? And, equally important, what policy proposals will not have unintended consequences that will actually make matters worse?

By Sebastian Kozuch
Heterodox STEM

Excerpt: For reference, I am a half Argentinian - half Israeli chemist; I think of myself as a center-left liberal both in an economic and political sense; I hate fascists and racists, and I believe that STEM direly needs more diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Having said that, I would like to tell you a small story from a chemical laboratory that can serve as a useful analogy for the point I want to raise. Please bear with me.

By John Jiang
American Spectator

Excerpt: Affirmative action in higher education is set to face the judgment of the Supreme Court. The moment is quietly exhilarating. This is an injustice that has been hoisted upon so many, for so long, and with the patronage of so many powerful institutions that it seemed perhaps too big and too heavy to ever remove. Yet the same was true of Roe v. Wade, and now Roe v. Wade is gone.

By Hannah Natanson
The Washington Post

Excerpt: Books about LGBTQ people are fast becoming the main target of a historic wave of school book challenges — and a large percentage of the complaints come from a minuscule number of hyperactive adults, a first-of-its-kind Washington Post analysis found.