National Free Speech News & Commentary

Alyssa Lukpat and Nicholas Hatcher
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: A new round of pro-Palestinian demonstrations swept the University of California, Los Angeles, where 25 protesters were arrested after setting up an encampment, the latest outburst of campus tensions over the Israel-Hamas war.

The UCLA Police Department said about 100 people put up tents and barriers Monday afternoon and moved the encampment twice after being ordered to disperse. The protesters made enough noise to disrupt students taking final exams nearby, police said. The people in the demonstration were affiliated with a student group on campus, according to the police department.

Nathan Honeycutt
FIRE

Excerpt: Confidence in higher education has plummeted to its lowest level ever according to the results of two new national polls commissioned by FIRE and conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.

Per the polls, American confidence in higher education has plummeted over the past year, reaching record lows after months of campus protests over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Congressional hearings about anti-Semitism on college campuses.

Megan McArdle
Washington Post

Excerpt: After a decade of ever-escalating commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion, elite campuses are reversing course. It's amazing to watch such an abrupt volte-face. What’s even more amazing is how far things went beforehand and how long the correction took to arrive.

Such double-think regimes are vulnerable to what economist Timur Kuran calls a “preference cascade in reverse”: As people realize their neighbors share their skepticism, they start voicing their true opinions, an effect that dominoes until the whole regime collapses.

Jeremy W. Peters
New York Times

Excerpt: Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each recently announced that they will no longer require diversity statements as a part of their hiring process for faculty posts.

The decisions by two of the nation’s leading institutions of higher learning could influence others to follow suit.

Jessie Appleby
FIRE

Excerpt: Despite the real benefits of virtual meetings, they are not a replacement for real life. At its best, they facilitate meetings and communication that otherwise could not have occurred. But a screen cannot replicate the experience of an in-person gathering. In short, virtual events and in-person events are not interchangeable.

Yet many universities have started treating them as such. In recent years, FIRE has seen schools increasingly rely on the availability of virtual meeting platforms to evade their constitutional and other free speech obligations to provide sufficient security for events to proceed without sustained disruption.

Kurt Streeter
New York Times

Excerpt: Waves of boos, angry chants and the steady rhythm of feet pounding on metal seats were upending the graduation ceremony at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Viva, viva Palestina!” students sang out. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Israel’s apartheid has got to go!”

Once it was over and most had left the school’s low-slung football stadium, Berkeley’s chancellor, Carol Christ, sat near the podium in a folding chair. She is silver-haired and soft-spoken, a soon-to-retire 80-year-old former English professor with an unusual background for the modern college president: Her views on free speech first crystallized during her years as a student protester in the turbulent 1960s.