National Free Speech News & Commentary

MIT Free Speech Alliance

Excerpt: The MIT Free Speech Alliance and Adam Smith Society are co-sponsors of this debate, presented at MIT's Wong Auditorium on November 2, 2023. In this debate, two teams will debate the resolution, "Resolved that STEM is Systemically Racist."

Gregory Kearney and Joshua Rauh
Liberty Lens, Substack

Excerpt: In recent years, America’s leadership class has become increasingly antagonistic toward long-standing norms around free speech. As we laid out in one of our recent pieces, government bureaucrats have increasing endorsed the use of censorship under the guise of protecting Americans from so-called mis- and disinformation.

In this piece, we focus specifically on some of the reasons for this shift in stated values and that shift’s impact on those who dare to dissent from elite orthodoxy particularly within academia.

Jacob Mchangama
Persuasion

Excerpt: Open democracies should not retreat from the institutional and civic commitment to free expression, however ugly many of its current manifestations are. Freedom of expression serves its most important function at times of deep polarization, where the sense of righteous indignation tempts us to silence the viewpoints we hate with scant regard for the collateral damage to democracy, freedom, and tolerance that constitute the necessary precondition for social peace in diverse societies.

ACLU

Excerpt: In an open letter delivered to over 650 college and university leaders, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) expressed its strong opposition to any efforts to stifle free speech and association on college campuses, and urged universities to reject calls to investigate, disband, or penalize pro-Palestinian student groups for exercising their free speech rights. The letter follows a call to universities to investigate Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters for “material support for terrorism,” without citing any evidence of such support.

Nell Gluckman
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Earlier this year, Shirin Saeidi was at a dinner with three speakers who had been invited to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville center she directs when they told her something that surprised her. As part of the paperwork that would allow them to be reimbursed and paid for the trip, they had been prompted to sign a pledge saying they were not boycotting Israel. They told her it was something they would have liked to have known about beforehand.

PEN America

Excerpt: A wave of antisemitic rhetoric, harassment, threats, vandalism and violence has rocked campuses across the U.S. as the Israel-Hamas war escalates. At Cornell University, law enforcement was called in to investigate what the university president called “a series of horrendous, antisemitic messages threatening violence” against the campus’s Jewish community that forced students into lockdown. Drexel University, a women’s restroom was reportedly defaced with antisemitic graffiti and a Jewish student’s dormitory door was set on fire. At Bates College, a swastika was drawn in a public restroom and at American University a swastika and Nazi slogan were graffitied in a student dorm.