National Free Speech News & Commentary

David Brooks
New York Times

Excerpt: Over the past five weeks, Jewish students on America’s campuses have found themselves confronted with those who celebrate a terrorist operation that featured the mass murder and reportedly the rape of fellow Jews. They see images of people tearing down posters of kidnapped Jewish children. At M.I.T., Jewish students report that they were told by some faculty members to avoid the university’s main lobby — which had been the site of a pro-Palestinian protest — for their own safety. At Cooper Union, Jewish students were barricaded in the library by a protest that started out as a pro-Palestinian demonstration and quickly became, one student reported, “pure anti-Jew.”

Jennifer Schuessler
New York Times

Excerpt: Hunter College this week abruptly pulled a screening of a documentary film critical of Israel, creating a backlash from faculty members and students who have charged the New York school’s administration with undermining academic freedom.

The documentary, “Israelism,” investigates what it calls the uncritical love of the Jewish state inculcated in American Jews, through the stories of two young Jews who travel to Israel and the West Bank. There they encounter a different reality from the one they said they learned at their religious day schools and summer camps.

Richard Amesbury and Catherine O’Donnell
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Academics are losing the support of the public. We read it in newspapers, we see it in surveys, we feel it in our bones. There are many dimensions to this problem. One is the claim that colleges restrict speech and lack intellectual diversity.

Whether and by whom free speech is under threat on campuses are hotly debated questions. Less commonly examined, however, are the assumptions that free speech is a cardinal virtue of higher education, and that colleges should aspire to a diversity of opinions. Are these goals in their own right, as college administrators often seem to think, or means for achieving something else altogether?

David Brooks
New York Times

Excerpt: Over the past five weeks, Jewish students on America’s campuses have found themselves confronted with those who celebrate a terrorist operation that featured the mass murder and reportedly the rape of fellow Jews. They see images of people tearing down posters of kidnapped Jewish children.

Universities are supposed to be centers of inquiry and curiosity — places where people are tolerant of difference and learn about other points of view. Instead, too many have become brutalizing ideological war zones, so today the most hostile place to be an American Jew is not at some formerly restricted country club but on a college campus.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: A professor is suing the Mayo Clinic medical school after a department chair threatened to fire him following a CNN interview in which he criticized the National Institutes of Health for not backing a COVID-19 treatment and a New York Times interview in which he said testosterone improves athletic performance.

Dr. Michael J. Joyner, an anesthesiology professor, filed the lawsuit Monday in a Minnesota state court in Olmsted County against the Mayo Clinic, Mayo’s College of Medicine and Science, Dr. Gianrico Farrugia and Dr. Carlos B. Mantilla.

Katherine Knott
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on college campuses are behind the recent spike in campus antisemitism, several House Republicans said Tuesday during a hearing on “confronting the scourge of antisemitism on campus.”

“I think DEI is a fraud and what we’re seeing now on campuses is proof of that,” said Burgess Owens, the Utah Republican who chairs the House higher education subcommittee.