National Free Speech News & Commentary

María Luisa Paúl
Washington Post

Excerpt: A teacher was fired Wednesday by the Waukesha, Wis., school board after she publicly criticized school administrators’ decision to prohibit her first-grade class from singing a song about rainbows earlier this year.

PEN America

Excerpt: The end of June marks the conclusion of most state legislative sessions. One new educational gag order and one higher education autonomy restriction became law in June, with others in Ohio and Texas going down narrowly to defeat.

After reviewing these new laws, we examine an aspect of higher education governance that has increasingly been targeted in legislative censorship efforts and seems likely to figure centrally in next year’s legislative sessions: college and university accreditation.

Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: A women’s soccer coach at Geneva College, a Christian institution in Pennsylvania, was fired in June for posting messages supporting the LGBTQ community on her Instagram page, Religion News Service reported.

The coach, Kelsey Morrison, identifies as gay but was celibate, allowing her to remain within the university’s conduct code, which forbids “sexual immorality” including “homosexual behavior.” She had coached at Geneva for two years.

Stephanie Saul
New York Times

Excerpt: Kathleen McElroy, who had recently served as the director of the University of Texas’s School of Journalism, was thrilled to embark on a new assignment: running a similar program at her alma mater, Texas A&M University.

Quickly, though, things started to unravel. Dr. McElroy, who once worked as an editor at The New York Times, said she was notified by the university’s interim dean of liberal arts, José Luis Bermúdez, of political pushback over her appointment.

Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder
Washington Monthly

Excerpt: The Supreme Court’s rejection of affirmative action in college admissions will provoke widespread debate. But not in the classrooms of Florida’s public colleges and universities, because the Stop WOKE Act prohibits it. 

That’s why we were happy to submit an amicus brief last Friday to support the plaintiffs—seven faculty members and a student group—seeking to strike down the Stop WOKE Act. The law is subject to a preliminary injunction, pending appeal from Florida. The federal appeals court for the Eleventh Circuit is expected to rule in the next six months.

Greg Sargent
Washington Post

Excerpt: In recent weeks, plaintiffs who are suing to invalidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “Stop Woke Act” have been confronting its defenders with a seemingly loaded question: Would the law, which restricts school discussion of race, prohibit a public university professor from endorsing affirmative action in a classroom setting?

Surprisingly, lawyers defending the DeSantis administration just answered this question with a qualified “yes.” Which exposes a core truth about his anti-woke directives: They really do constitute efforts at state censorship, not just of concepts he likes to call “woke indoctrination” but also of viewpoints that are contested yet remain squarely within mainstream academic discourse.