National Free Speech News & Commentary

Commentary: New faculty-led organization at Harvard will defend academic freedom

Commentary: New faculty-led organization at Harvard will defend academic freedom

April 12, 2023 1 min read

by Steven Pinker and Bertha Madras, Boston Globe

We have joined with 50 colleagues to create a new Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. It’s not about us. For many years we have each expressed strong and often unorthodox opinions with complete freedom and with the support, indeed warm encouragement, of our colleagues, deans, and presidents.

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Texas lawmakers move forward with proposed bans on faculty tenure, diversity offices in public colleges

Texas lawmakers move forward with proposed bans on faculty tenure, diversity offices in public colleges

April 11, 2023 1 min read

This month, Texas Senate Republicans advanced bills that would prohibit tenure and diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, offices. The Senate’s Committee on Education approved the anti-tenure bill last week 9-3, with one lawmaker absent, while its Subcommittee on Higher Education moved the diversity office legislation to the full committee.
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Commentary: The Gravest Threats to Campus Speech Come From States, Not Students

April 10, 2023 1 min read

by Christina Paxson, President of Brown University, New York Times

America is facing a fundamental threat‌, and it echoes a dark past. In 1633, Galileo was forced to renounce the “false opinion” that the Earth circled the sun since it collided with the prevailing beliefs of the Catholic Church. 

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Stanford Law School's Black Students' Group Will No Longer Help Law School Recruit Minority Students in the Wake of Duncan Apology

April 10, 2023 1 min read

by Aaron Sibarium, Washington Free Beacon

Stanford University's Black Law Students Association will no longer help the university recruit black students after the law school's dean, Jenny Martinez, apologized in early March to Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan.

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At Stanford Law School, the Dean Takes a Stand for Free Speech. Will It Work?

April 08, 2023 1 min read

Stanford Law School was under extraordinary pressure. For nearly two weeks, there had been mounting anger over the treatment of a conservative federal judge, whose talk had been disrupted by student hecklers.

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Commentary: College Students Have Something to Say. It’s Just Not What You’d Expect.

April 06, 2023 1 min read

by Jonathan Malesic, New York Times

In the debate over free speech and social justice, commentators on the right and the “heterodox” left often claim that college students are all either stridently liberal or cowed into silence by those who are.

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