National Free Speech News & Commentary

Lee Gutkin
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: If you’ve taught at a college or university in the last decade, you’ve almost certainly sat through some required diversity, equity, and inclusion programming. Perhaps you were on a search committee and had to meet regularly with a diversity consultant who promised to help root out your implicit biases. Or you were a graduate student asked to attend a workshop on “antiracist pedagogy.” Perhaps you were invited, or even compelled, to attend a session on “allyship training.”

All of this stuff has been controversial for a long time, felt by many to be a form of ideological indoctrination. But a new study sponsored by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and the Rutgers University Social Perception Lab suggests that, even on its own terms, it just doesn’t work.

Rich Lowry
National Review

Excerpt: DEI is a bad idea whose time came with a vengeance several years ago, but now its continued ascendancy is in doubt. Perhaps the most important event this year outside of the presidential election is the intellectual collapse of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is poisonous hokum that is finally being exposed as such.

DEI has been one of the most morally perverse and damaging fads in recent American history.

Minding the Campus
Richard Vedder

Excerpt: For decades, international testing data have shown that the United States, for all its leadership in technological innovation and economic success, has been, at best, so-so in teaching fundamental knowledge to young Americans. Moreover, the situation appears to have worsened, aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has not recovered to anemic pre-pandemic levels since. And, a recent RealClear Investigations report documents that our K-12 schools are enhancing mediocrity by worsening an already wrongheaded grade inflation by continuing to give students high grades even as their learning continues to decline. As one refreshing voice of sanity, Maryland education chief Carey Wright put it, “If you set the bar low, that’s all you are going to get. But if you set the bar high for students, and support teachers and leaders, it [higher student performance] is doable.”

William Deresiewicz
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions — as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate — have been rejected. This was already evident before November 5. It can now no longer be denied.

The Eternally Radical Idea
Greg Lukianoff

Excerpt: One of the great disappointments of my professional life has been watching the decline of the American Association of University Professors, formerly the gold standard for defense of academic freedom on campus. Of course, there have always been and still are good, principled AAUP members and chapters out there. But since the beginning of my career back in 2001, the national AAUP have gone from being principled (if slow and plodding) defenders of academic freedom to increasingly partisan critics of freedom of speech and the First Amendment — taking institutional positions that directly threaten academic freedom.

And then a small group of college administrators decided to blow it all up.

Why Evolution is True
Jerry Coyne

Excerpt: A reader called my attention to a new quarterly online magazine called Sapir. It’s edited by the NYT writer Bret Stephens, it’s free, and it has a number of intriguing articles (check out this interview with Daniel Diermeier, our former provost and now chancellor of Vanderbilt University). It also offers a free one-year hard-copy subscription here.

The magazine appears to deal largely but not exclusively with matters Jewish (Stephens’s background). Among the secular pieces is a fine new article by Stephens himself that you can access by clicking on the title below. It’s about the demise of liberalism in American universities, including a defense of what Stephens considers true liberalism and a list of obstacles to university reform. It’s short and well worth reading.