National Free Speech News & Commentary

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling against race-based college admissions (which involved Harvard), and the likely illegality of hiring faculty based on race, colleges are beginning to ratchet back on DEI-based admissions and hiring. (Although nobody’s yet taken a college to court for requiring DEI statements, I’m betting that such statements would be banned for constituting compelled speech.)

Now that MIT banned DEI statements for faculty job applications, the other great school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard, has just followed suit. According to the two articles below, Harvard has banned diversity statements.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Last month something happened that has little, if any, public precedent: A university fired a faculty member almost immediately not for out-of-classroom speech but for an optional course assignment. DePaul University dismissed adjunct Anne d’Aquino midway through her first quarter teaching Health 194: Human Pathogens and Defense.

DePaul spokespeople said students and others had expressed concern about the assignment and an accompanying email from d’Aquino that focused on Palestine and included the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” The assignment asked students to, among other things, explain “the impact of genocide/ethnic cleansing on the health/biology of the people it impacts.”

Nicquel Terry Ellis
CNN

Excerpt: When the police killings of Black people, including George Floyd set off racial unrest across the country in 2020, Marie Vergamini decided she wanted to do her part to help address systemic racism. So, Vergamini, a doctoral student and adjunct instructor at Virginia Commonwealth University, joined a committee of faculty and students who were creating a racial literacy curriculum. The committee planned to make the racial literacy curriculum part of general education requirements for incoming students.

But the decisions to drop the course requirements at VCU and postpone them at George Mason have faced backlash from faculty and students who say the material is meant to prepare students for the real world by offering a better understanding of the nation’s history of racism and discrimination.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: If you’re interested in the campus protests, you’ll want to read the whole thing, but I’ll just post one excerpt about the concessions that universities made to protestors. Some are serious, others performative, but all were made to stop encampments and protestors.  

Maybe I’m a grumpy old man, but I would stop illegal disruptions, like encampments, in their tracks using sanctions, and would be very loath to “bargain” with protestors who enacted illegal disruptions. (If protests are legal and student “demands” worth considering, it’s another matter. But institutional neutrality, at least a Chicago, would prohibit almost any concessions for protestors, as it did indeed.)

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is True

Excerpt: The problem with the Harvard policy lies not in its specifics above, but how it appears to be interpreted by the creators/op-ed writers, who seem to misunderstand the principle of institutional neutrality, try to diss our Kalven Report (perhaps to say, “Hey, Harvard has its own report, and a better one”), and then suggest that Harvard’s policy can in some cases be applied in a non-neutral way. In other words, what we get is a decent policy whose authors (at least two of them) have described for the public as a dog’s breakfast. This does not bode well for any future “institutional neutrality” of Harvard.

Emma H. Haidar and Cam E. Kettles
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: After months of grappling with a campus fractured by a polarizing debate over the Israel-Hamas war, Harvard announced on Tuesday that the University and its leadership will refrain from taking official positions on controversial public policy issues.

The University’s new stance followed a report produced from a faculty-led “Institutional Voice” working group, which advised leadership to not “issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.” Interim Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 wrote in an email that he accepted the working group’s recommendations, which were also endorsed by the Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body.