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Frank Bruni
New York Times
Excerpt: What Trump and his allies are doing is no targeted effort to correct that. It’s a sweeping, indiscriminate, performative smackdown of elite institutions by a crew trying to solidify its power under the banner of anti-elitism. It doesn’t attempt to usher those institutions from a place of bias and extremism to one of neutrality and moderation. It answers excess with excess, orthodoxy with orthodoxy, censorship with censorship. And it disregards the damage it’s doing.
Cathy Young
The Bulwark
Excerpt: Last week's right-wing freakout over the Cracker Barrel logo redesign—apparently amounting to white-guy erasure—had more than its share of sublimely ridiculous moments. But none, perhaps, were more emblematic of the current “anti-woke” crusade than the call to action from author, activist, and Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo.
Of course, what also makes it noteworthy is that Rufo isn’t just some random social-media blowhard. In recent months, he has emerged as the unofficial ideologue of the Trumpian assault on the liberal cultural establishment.
Amann S. Mahajan
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: Harvard’s graduate student union requested that the University guarantee academic freedom protections for graduate students’ teaching and research pursuits in a new contract proposal on Thursday, joining a growing roster of graduate unions that have requested similar provisions in recent years.
The proposal, presented during a bargaining session with University negotiators, would establish a definition of academic freedom for graduate students in their work as teaching and research assistants. It would also nod toward broader free speech protections, codifying student workers’ right to “express themselves peacefully as members of society or as representatives of their fields of instruction, study, or research.”
Jennifer Schuessler and Vimal Patel
New York Times
Excerpt: The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an increasingly prominent free-speech organization, has long been known as a fierce opponent of campus political correctness. Since its founding in 1999, it has been celebrated for defending conservatives and other dissidents from the prevailing liberal culture at America’s universities.
Jennifer Schuessler and Vimal Patel
New York Times
Excerpt: The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an increasingly prominent free-speech organization, has long been known as a fierce opponent of campus political correctness. Since its founding in 1999, it has been celebrated for defending conservatives and other dissidents from the prevailing liberal culture at America’s universities.
The group, long a scourge of university administrators, also finds itself working to help protect schools it has criticized in the past from new threats. When FIRE filed a brief in support of Harvard’s lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s cuts in research funds, the group noted its own record as “a leading critic of Harvard’s inconsistent and insufficient protection of free speech and academic freedom.”
William C. Mao and Veronica H. Paulus
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: A Harvard administrator told two professors on Tuesday that a Black Lives Matter sign displayed in their office windows would be taken down by this Saturday, describing it as a violation of University-wide rules on using campus space.
Bence P. Ölveczky and Mansi Srivastava, professors of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, posted large block letters in their windows spelling out “Black Lives Matter” in 2020 as protests broke out nationwide over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Since then, the letters have faced out from the Northwest Science Building, where their labs are located.
