National Free Speech News & Commentary

Zach Montague
New York Times

Excerpt: With a new academic year well underway, more than 60 colleges and universities are still under federal investigation over antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents during the campus protests that swept the United States after the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, according to the Department of Education.

Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: With Monday marking the first anniversary of Hamas’s deadly attack on Israeli civilians and the beginning of the war in Gaza, numerous colleges are aiming to commemorate and honor the lives lost in the Middle East over the past year while also preparing for a new wave of protests.

Cathy Young
The Bulwark

Excerpt: THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA’S DECISION last week to punish tenured law professor Amy Wax with a one-year suspension and other sanctions for what her defenders call controversial opinions—and her detractors call racist hate speech—has been widely criticized as an egregious assault on intellectual freedom.

What ultimately emerges from an attempt to dig through the murky and complicated facts is an all-too-familiar story: that of a once-acclaimed conservative scholar on the path from heterodoxy to crackpottery and from outspoken to deliberately offensive. It is also one of those cases in which supporters of academic freedom must defend the right to express odious views without sugarcoating their odiousness.

Jerry A. Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: Bill Ackman is the billionaire hedge-fund manager who not only publicized the drop of donations to Harvard because of its purported antisemitism, but also helped bring down President Claudine Gay. But he’s also a double Harvard alum.

Apparently Ackman gave an invited talk about the Harvard Corporation, couched in financial jargon. There are 49 slides, and they pretty much encompass his thesis, which is that Harvard has become a business aimed not at providing a quality education to students, but to enriching the Corporation, and its mission has changed from promoting learning to pushing a “progressive” ideology.  In the process, it’s become woke and bloated with administrators.  But Ackman does seem some glimmers of hope on the horizon.

Susan H. Greenberg
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Protesters at the UC Berkeley School of Law disrupted a talk by an Israeli lawmaker last week, forcing him to deliver remarks remotely via Zoom, SFGATE reported.

The law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society had invited Simcha Rothman, a far-right member of Israel’s Parliament, to speak at an event Tuesday titled Restoring Democracy: The Debate Over Judicial Reform in Israel. Rothman is a key proponent of a controversial bill to give the Knesset more oversight of Israel’s judicial system.

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley’s Blog

Excerpt: In the 1930s, Bertolt Brecht asked “What if they gave a war and nobody came?”  As someone who has been a teacher for over 30 years, I find myself increasingly asking the same question as trust and enrollments fall in higher education. There has been a precipitous decline in enrollments across the country as universities worry about covering their costs without raising already high tuition rates. From 2010 to 2021, enrollments fell from roughly 18.1 million students to about 15.4 million.

There is also an increasing view of higher education as an academic echo chamber for far left agendas. For many, there is little appeal in going to campuses where you are expected to self-censor and professors reject your values as part of their lesson plans.