National Free Speech News & Commentary

Three Columbia Deans Who Sent Texts Evoking ‘Antisemitic Tropes’ Are Resigning

August 08, 2024 1 min read

Robert Barba
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Three Columbia University deans, who were placed on indefinite leave last month over insensitive text messages they sent during a panel about Jewish life on campus, are resigning, a university spokeswoman said Thursday.
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A Big Chunk of Professors Flunked U of Florida Post-Tenure Review

August 07, 2024 1 min read 1 Comment

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Post-tenure reviews aren’t a new phenomenon in higher education. The American Association of University Professors has had a stance on them going back to 1983, and in 1999 it released a report saying they should be for “faculty development” and not “undertaken for the purpose of dismissal.”

Now, the first round of post-tenure reviews has been completed. And the flagship University of Florida’s process produced a figure that has raised eyebrows among its faculty: About one-fifth of reviewed professors failed to pass muster or gave up defending their tenure.
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Commentary: A Q&A on sadness and social justice fundamentalism in ‘Plain English’

August 07, 2024 1 min read

Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack

Excerpt: I recently appeared on “Plain English with Derek Thompson” to discuss “The Coddling of the American Mind” and how what Tim Urban calls “social justice fundamentalism,” otherwise called “wokeness,” affects mental health. Readers will recall my May 21 ERI post with my FIRE colleague Andrea Lan where we delved into the data on this.

As I mentioned on X recently, the reactions to the episode have ranged from thoughtful and interesting to the unsurprising assertions of, “My side is happy because we're better people. Your side is miserable because you're terrible people,” and, “My side is miserable because we actually see the world accurately. Your side is happy because you're selfish monsters.”
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The Resurgence of Antisemitism in American Higher Education

August 06, 2024 1 min read 1 Comment

Paul Larkin
Heritage Foundation

Excerpt: The text of the Constitution prohibits the adoption of a religious qualification as a prerequisite for holding federal office, and the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause bars the federal or state governments from denying anyone the ability to adopt whatever religious beliefs he or she chooses to treat as sacred.

But culture can be upstream or downstream of the law. In the case of antisemitism, American society did not extirpate it; it merely drove antisemitism underground, where it lay in wait for a chance to return. Sadly, it is back, as the events on America’s campuses have proved in the months since Hamas launched its brutal, murderous, and savage attack on Israel and its people on October 7, 2023.
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The Growing Trend of Attacks on Tenure

August 05, 2024 1 min read

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Over the past two years, lawmakers in at least 10 states have pushed legislation that would weaken—or outright eliminate—tenure in public colleges and universities. With the exception of a Democratic state senator in Hawai’i, these bills have all been pushed by Republicans in states such as Texas where the party controls the Legislature.

Despite these proposals, no state has actually gone through with fully banning tenure from its public colleges and universities. The bills that would’ve done so either failed to pass or were watered down before passage after facing opposition from faculty members, who stress that tenure protects academic freedom, including for conservatives, and from university leaders, who say it helps recruit professors who could make more outside academe.
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Commentary: I grew up in Cuba. Self-censorship in American universities is all too familiar to me.

August 02, 2024 1 min read

Justo Atonio Triana
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Growing up in Cuba, I had to measure with surgical precision each of my words at school, knowing they could possibly be deemed “problematic,” meaning “counterrevolutionary,” meaning I — or worse, my family — could get in serious trouble for what I said.

Arriving in the United States in 2019, I again found myself self-censoring in a classroom.
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