National Free Speech News & Commentary

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: In the summer of 2022, Florida newspapers reported on the strange appearance of $3 million in one-time funds from Florida’s GOP-controlled state Legislature for something called the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civics Education at the University of Florida. The university said it hadn’t asked for this new entity.

Two years later, this center—backed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis and now embraced by university officials—is rapidly expanding to become a UF college. But the center has remained beset with controversy, from its murky origins to university investigations of its alleged faculty opponents to a summer Faculty Senate approval of its degrees that left some professors feeling “railroaded.”

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: After several years of effort, graduate students getting paid for research or teaching at the University of Chicago joined a labor union.  Because they couldn’t form a union de novo but had to join an existing one, they became dues-paying members of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, Local 11o3.

But joining the union came with an unexpected downside: unions can take political and ideological positions, and as a member of one (qualified students are required to join and pay union dues), you implicitly sign on to those positions.  And you may not want to do that.  In the case at hand, the Union has taken pro-Palestinian positions, and some students, especially Jewish ones, don’t want to sign on to these positions. So a group called “Graduate Students for Academic Freedom” has sued the union, alleging that the union makes them engage in implicit endorsement of the union’s positions.

Jonathan Zimmerman
Philadelphia Inquirer

Excerpt: How should schools regulate what students post on the internet?
I don’t know. But here’s what I do know: We’ll never craft good policies around online student speech unless we listen to what students have to say.

That’s been the missing voice in the controversy in Great Valley, a Chester County school district where middle school students made 22 TikTok accounts impersonating their teachers. Some of the fake videos were truly horrible, casting the teachers as pedophiles or depicting them in sexual encounters with each other.

Steven Porter
Boston Globe

Excerpt: Prosecutors are pressing forward with formal criminal charges against most of the 12 people who were arrested when pro-Palestinian demonstrators attempted to establish an encampment May 1 at the University of New Hampshire.

A prosecutor with the UNH Police Department filed formal complaints Wednesday against eight defendants, including six who were UNH students at the time of their arrest, alleging they committed misdemeanor trespassing and disorderly conduct by refusing to comply with a dispersal order, according to court records.

Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack

Excerpt: the line between these two sides of the argument can’t be so clear-cut, can it? Surely, at least some of the people who argue that words are violence have in fact been punched in the face. So why would they make the argument anyway?

I fear the answer is simple: It's a tactical advantage when facing any speaker you hate. Equating words and violence is a rhetorical escalation designed to protect an all-too-human preference which Nat Hentoff, a dearly departed friend and a great defender of freedom of speech in the 20th century, used to call “Free speech for me, but not for thee.”

Eric Kelderman
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Ben Sasse’s appointment as president of the University of Florida in late 2022 was hailed by his supporters as an opportunity to remake a flagship institution. Less than two years later, he is stepping down before having time to meaningfully influence the university’s direction.

Sasse announced his resignation late on Thursday with a social-media post on X (formerly Twitter) explaining that he needed to spend more time helping his wife, Melissa, deal with the ongoing effects of an aneurysm she suffered in 2007.