National Free Speech News & Commentary

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: The litany of college wokeness, and especially the harm it causes, is now being discussed by the mainstream media, including the Atlantic and the Washington Post. Here, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the most respected venue for discussing college affairs, published a long piece (ca. 6000 words) discussing how “a decade of ideological transformation”—and that means “wokeness”—is no longer off limits to criticism.

James Hankins
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Claudine Gay, the president of my university, is under attack for academic dishonesty. She is charged with several instances of plagiarism, in her dissertation and other published work, in addition to data falsification. As of this writing it seems not unlikely that she may be fired or asked to resign.

What concerns me is that the public discussion so far hasn’t shown a sufficient appreciation of how serious academic honesty is in research institutions. Some of Ms. Gay’s supporters treat the allegations as trivial, dismissing them as the product of right-wing scandal-mongering. That is a historically uninformed view. Research universities, and the wider modern project of improving human life through research and scholarship, depend on academic honesty.

Doug Lederman
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The U.S. Education Department has added George Mason University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to the list of colleges and universities it is investigating for alleged discrimination based on shared ancestry.

In updating the list, the department does not say what possible violations it is investigating under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires federally funded institutions to protect students from discrimination based on race, color or national origin.

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita
Boston Review

Excerpt: While intolerance is a matter of culture, policy and administrative actions play a role in creating the culture. When university leaders who enthusiastically made statements about Black Lives Matter, knowing that such statements would likely discourage free expression of dissenting views on related issues, later assert a deep commitment to free expression concerning genocide of the Jews, they appear to be cynically picking and choosing their principles to suit short-run exigencies.

In this sense, university leaders are lying in a bed of their own making. I suspect at this point many wish they could give something like my First Amendment answer but cannot without facing charges of hypocrisy. One important question, then, is how they might get from here to there.

John Tomasi
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?” Instead of rising to the moment at a high-profile congressional hearing, Harvard president Claudine Gay ducked into a nearby legal hedge and crouched. The Economist put it kindly: “Sometimes you get the technicalities right but still flunk the test.” What test was flunked? The test of presidential leadership.

Jordan Howell
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Since the October 7 Hamas terror attacks in Israel and the subsequent invasion of Gaza, college campuses across the United States have experienced almost daily protests and demonstrations by students and faculty of all political stripes. Some are raising their voices in support of Israelis; others, in support of Palestinians.

That being said, FIRE has been troubled to see some college leaders react to protected speech and peaceful protests with calls to prohibit speech they view as inflammatory or even to ban student groups because of their viewpoints. The use of one phrase in particular — “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — is so hotly contested that some have called for banning its utterance entirely.