National Free Speech News & Commentary

Alyssa Lukpat
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: A federal judge ruled the University of California, Los Angeles, must ensure equal access to campus for Jewish students after some alleged in a lawsuit they were blocked by protesters at this spring’s pro-Palestinian encampments.

Francesca Block
The Free Press

Excerpt: The allegations were shocking. Fraternity brothers had been accused of beating new members with paddles, burning cigarettes into their skin, forcing them to lie on beds of nails, spitting on them, and commanding them to drink urine. University of Maryland administrators were alarmed by the claims, which appeared in their inboxes in late February, coming from at least two anonymous accounts. They decided to act fast.

But by the end of the school year in June, 35 Greek organizations out of the 37 on campus were cleared of all wrongdoing. The Maryland case, sources told me, reveals a double standard on American campuses today: students who openly break the law—including trespassing, breaking and entering, and harassing their fellow students—are given a pass when they’re committing crimes in the name of activism, while students suspected of behaving badly in their social lives are treated like villains.

Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Columbia University President Minouche Shafik resigned abruptly Wednesday night after months of pressure from Congress and campus constituents over her handling of pro-Palestinian student protests.

Shafik spent a little more than a year in the role, a tenure fraught with tension over how she navigated campus demonstrations related to the war between Israel and Hamas that began last fall. The protests at Columbia—which set off a wave of similar demonstrations at colleges across the nation—culminated in the construction of an encampment in the center of campus and the occupation of an administrative building for nearly two weeks, resulting in the arrest of more than 100 protesters in April.

Yuval Levin
Commentary

Excerpt: We seem to have reached a pivotal moment in the long-running battle for the soul of the American university.

The only positive effect of the campus crisis that followed October 7 has been the clarity it has provided. We have entered a phase of the university crisis in which this character of the dispute is clearer than ever. And it is therefore a phase in which the potential for some effective action against the academic revolutionaries and in defense of the traditional ethos of the university may be greater than it has been in half a century.

Alyssa Lukpat
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: A federal judge ruled the University of California, Los Angeles, must ensure equal access to campus for Jewish students after some alleged in a lawsuit they were blocked by protesters at this spring’s pro-Palestinian encampments.

Glenn C. Altschuler and David Wippman
The Hill

Excerpt: Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has spawned hundreds of campus protests and a series of widely publicized incidents that left many Jewish students feeling unsafe. These include an online threat to assault Jewish students at Cornell University; a Jewish counter-protester whose nose was broken while he was trying to stop the burning of an Israeli flag at Tulane; pro-Palestinian students pounding on the doors of Cooper Union library with Jewish students inside; the violent occupation of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University; and statements by student organizations at Harvard and faculty members at Yale, Columbia and Cornell appearing to justify Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks.

How accurate are claims that campus antisemitism is pervasive? The reality is more complicated than critics admit, and the result is often a mismatch between problems that actually exist and the responses that are emerging.