National Free Speech News & Commentary

Yuval Levin
Commentary

Excerpt: We seem to have reached a pivotal moment in the long-running battle for the soul of the American university.

The only positive effect of the campus crisis that followed October 7 has been the clarity it has provided. We have entered a phase of the university crisis in which this character of the dispute is clearer than ever. And it is therefore a phase in which the potential for some effective action against the academic revolutionaries and in defense of the traditional ethos of the university may be greater than it has been in half a century.

Alyssa Lukpat
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: A federal judge ruled the University of California, Los Angeles, must ensure equal access to campus for Jewish students after some alleged in a lawsuit they were blocked by protesters at this spring’s pro-Palestinian encampments.

Glenn C. Altschuler and David Wippman
The Hill

Excerpt: Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has spawned hundreds of campus protests and a series of widely publicized incidents that left many Jewish students feeling unsafe. These include an online threat to assault Jewish students at Cornell University; a Jewish counter-protester whose nose was broken while he was trying to stop the burning of an Israeli flag at Tulane; pro-Palestinian students pounding on the doors of Cooper Union library with Jewish students inside; the violent occupation of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University; and statements by student organizations at Harvard and faculty members at Yale, Columbia and Cornell appearing to justify Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks.

How accurate are claims that campus antisemitism is pervasive? The reality is more complicated than critics admit, and the result is often a mismatch between problems that actually exist and the responses that are emerging.

Joseph M. Knippenberg
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Excerpt: Earlier this summer, Harvard dean Lawrence Bobo wrote an essay for the Harvard Crimson that provoked a chorus of criticism, much of it justified. Reflecting on the post-October 7 turmoil on his campus, which had led, among other things, to the resignation of President Claudine Gay, Bobo argued that faculty should be disciplined for airing the university’s dirty laundry in public.

I would like to approach Bobo’s argument by focusing on the goal that he and his critics share: the institutional independence of the university as a knowledge-seeking enterprise.

Hans Bader
Minding the Campus

Excerpt: If a university is ordered by the government to investigate each instance of speech that is bigoted to determine if it cumulatively contributed to a “hostile environment” for some minority group, it will have a powerful incentive to adopt a “zero tolerance” policy for offensive speech, to avoid the time and expense of constant investigations, and avoid potential liability for a “hostile environment.” That’s true even if the speech is political or religious, such as advocating the elimination of Israel or Palestinian self-rule or questioning Jewish, Arab, or Middle Eastern practices.

Yet, that burdensome duty to censor is more or less what the Biden administration told universities to do in recent Title VI and Title IX investigations, such as in a press release about an investigation of Drexel University for anti-Semitism, and an accompanying letter resolving the Title VI investigation.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The chancellor of Florida’s state university system has launched a review of public university courses for “antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias” following controversy this summer over a textbook and quiz questions allegedly used at Florida International University.

Randy Fine, a Republican member of the Florida House, who is Jewish and who served alongside the chancellor and calls him a friend, said the statewide review “absolutely” came from an incident at Florida International University this summer. “When we learned that Florida universities were using a factually inaccurate, openly antisemitic textbook, we realized there was a problem that had to be addressed,” Fine told Inside Higher Ed Thursday.