National Free Speech News & Commentary

Margaret Peppiatt
College Fix

Excerpt: The University of Houston-Downtown is facing a lawsuit that claims a former dean discriminated against a black, gay staff member.

The lawsuit alleges that Carlos Gooden, the university’s executive director of graduate business programs, faced discrimination on the basis of race and sexual orientation from the former dean of the business school who hired him, Charles Gengler. A longtime friend of Gengler’s, however, argues the lawsuit is filled with unsubstantiated fabrications, and Gengler’s attorney has called the complaint a “sham.”

Heterodox Academy

Excerpt: University orientation programs are foundational to the new student experience on campus. These programs cover helpful logistics of campus life and operations and, importantly, they also set the stage for the student experience, intellectual values, and social life. But how should orientation programs be structured to ensure that HxA values of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement are instilled at the outset?

During this discussion, our panel of experts will discuss what student orientations need to cover, what they cover out of choice, and what they should cover.

Ashlynn Warta
James G. Martin Center for Academic Freedom

Excerpt: In July of 2020, UNC-Chapel Hill’s chancellor sent an email to the university’s leadership cabinets requesting responses to three questions regarding “structural racism.” Through public records requests, the Martin Center obtained a copy of the many responses submitted over the following days by Chapel Hill’s academic and administrative units.

Our previous article on this subject introduced the chancellor’s DEI questionnaire and examined some of the more extreme proposals supplied by respondents. Below, we look in greater detail at the “solutions” proposed by Chapel Hill’s various divisions and schools.

George Packer
The Atlantic

Excerpt: In June 1953, at the height of the McCarthy era, while congressional investigators and private groups were hunting down “subversive” or merely “objectionable” books and authors in the name of national security, the American Library Association and the Association Book Publishers Council issued a manifesto called “The Freedom to Read.”

This past June, the library and publishers’ associations reissued “The Freedom to Read” on its 70th anniversary. Scores of publishers, libraries, literary groups, civil-liberty organizations, and authors signed on to endorse its principles. And yet many of those institutional signatories—including the “Big Five” publishing conglomerates—often violate its propositions, perhaps not even aware that they’re doing so.

The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: The diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy has injected progressive politics into many corners of the private economy, but its role in medicine is especially pernicious. Now a lawsuit is challenging whether California can force doctors who teach continuing medical education courses to also teach racial politics.

Laura Beltz
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Kiosks and bulletin boards, where students share everything from band tryout notices to political statements, are a classic part of a college campus. Even in the age of social media, posting materials where fellow students will likely see them, on the way to class or their dorm, is a critical avenue for expression.

But the University of South Dakota put a roadblock smack-dab in the middle of that avenue with its heavy-handed Poster and Advertising Policy.