National Free Speech News & Commentary

Laura Spitalniak
Higher Ed Dive

Excerpt: In August, regional AAUP conferences surveyed 2,924 faculty members from twelve Southern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Roughly 60% of survey participants hold tenure.

Over half of faculty cited salary concerns and their state’s political climate as factors pushing them to pursue other employment, at 56.5% and 53.3% respectively. And 49.6% cited concerns over academic freedom.

Aaron Ross Powell
The Unpopullist, Substack

Excerpt: Today we’re diving into one of the most pressing issues of our time: free speech. Our host Aaron Ross Powell is joined by a special guest, Ken White—better known online as Popehat—a First Amendment expert, seasoned criminal defense attorney, civil litigator, and cohost of the Serious Trouble podcast.

Together, they’ll explore some of the most pressing questions in free speech discourse today: Have we become too quick to label some speech as offensive? Are we idealizing a past where free expression was supposedly more open? And, most importantly, how can we foster richer, more nuanced conversations in an increasingly polarized world?

Bill Frezza
Heterodox STEM, Substack

Excerpt: I recently had the pleasure of serving as one of the judges for a high school debate program called Incubate Debate held at the New College of Florida. It also included an evening speaking to and with the students involved, who ranged in age from 12 to 18. They had spent an entire week in this residential program training for the big event, learning how to research and debate complex and controversial issues with vigor, clarity, and civility.

I was shocked by how outspoken, courageous, courteous, studious, poised, well-informed, attentive, and totally uninfected by the Woke Mind Virus these kids were. It gives me fresh hope for the next generation.

Cass Sunstein
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Public colleges and universities are bound by the First Amendment. Their private counterparts are not (though a state might choose to apply the requirements of the First Amendment to them, as California has largely done). But if private universities choose to follow the First Amendment, they will make life a lot easier, and also a lot better, for faculty, administrators, and students alike.

One reason is that First Amendment principles make most cases easy. Still, there are plenty of hard cases. Many of the hardest arise when a college or university claims that restrictions are justified by its educational mission. In some cases, such restrictions really can be so justified. A university can direct a history professor to teach history, not physics, in a history class. That's a form of content discrimination, and it's okay.

Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack

Excerpt: For the fifth consecutive year, FIRE has delivered its annual College Free Speech Rankings. This year, we paired the largest survey of college student attitudes on free expression ever conducted (almost 59,000 students surveyed!) with the most comprehensive databases ever collected of deplatforming attempts, professor cancellation attempts, student cancellation attempts (full database forthcoming, but the incidents used in the rankings calculation are on our website), and speech codes ever collected.  

The full report is well worth reading. But to prime you for it, here are five key takeaways that show how colleges have moved around, explore why that might be, and highlight what students need to work on most.

FIRE Press Release

Excerpt: This year’s College Free Speech Rankings — released today by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and College Pulse — offer comprehensive insights into the state of free speech on America’s college campuses.

The largest report of its kind, the rankings draw from more than 58,000 student responses representing more than 250 colleges and universities nationwide. The report arrives at a time when protest over the Israel-Hamas war has put campus speech concerns at the forefront of the national conversation for nearly a year.