National Free Speech News & Commentary

Paul Larkin
Heritage Foundation

Excerpt: The text of the Constitution prohibits the adoption of a religious qualification as a prerequisite for holding federal office, and the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause bars the federal or state governments from denying anyone the ability to adopt whatever religious beliefs he or she chooses to treat as sacred.

But culture can be upstream or downstream of the law. In the case of antisemitism, American society did not extirpate it; it merely drove antisemitism underground, where it lay in wait for a chance to return. Sadly, it is back, as the events on America’s campuses have proved in the months since Hamas launched its brutal, murderous, and savage attack on Israel and its people on October 7, 2023.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Over the past two years, lawmakers in at least 10 states have pushed legislation that would weaken—or outright eliminate—tenure in public colleges and universities. With the exception of a Democratic state senator in Hawai’i, these bills have all been pushed by Republicans in states such as Texas where the party controls the Legislature.

Despite these proposals, no state has actually gone through with fully banning tenure from its public colleges and universities. The bills that would’ve done so either failed to pass or were watered down before passage after facing opposition from faculty members, who stress that tenure protects academic freedom, including for conservatives, and from university leaders, who say it helps recruit professors who could make more outside academe.

Justo Atonio Triana
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Growing up in Cuba, I had to measure with surgical precision each of my words at school, knowing they could possibly be deemed “problematic,” meaning “counterrevolutionary,” meaning I — or worse, my family — could get in serious trouble for what I said.

Arriving in the United States in 2019, I again found myself self-censoring in a classroom.

Tom Perkins and Will Craft
The Guardian

Excerpt: As antisemitism hearings on college campuses ignited late last year, US representatives Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx seized the spotlight, relentlessly attacking Harvard, Columbia and other top universities, portraying them as unsafe and incompetent.

A little-considered group of Stefanik and Foxx political allies and donors quietly benefited: the “for-profit” college industry.

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley’s Blog

Excerpt: In my new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I write about a global anti-free speech movement that is now sweeping over the United States. While not the first, it is in my view the most dangerous movement in our history due to an unprecedented alliance of government, corporate, academic, and media forces. That fear was amplified this week with polling showing that years of attacking free speech as harmful has begun to change the views of citizens.

Katherine Knott and Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The Biden administration’s new Title IX regulations, which strengthen protections for LGBTQ+ students and change how colleges respond to reports of sexual harassment, take effect today nationwide. Kind of.

So far, federal judges have issued six injunctions temporarily blocking the Education Department from enforcing the new Title IX rule in 26 states and hundreds of colleges in other states in response to lawsuits challenging the protections for LGBTQ+—and especially transgender—students. The first injunction was handed down June 14 and the most recent one issued July 31. The drip, drip, drip of court orders over the last seven weeks is part of what’s become an incredibly contentious fight over Title IX that’s left college officials fearful, frustrated and unsure about what comes next.