National Free Speech News & Commentary

Maggie Hicks
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: This month, Raz Segal learned that he’d been offered a job to run the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota’s flagship. It was an exciting career move for Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University.

Five days later, Minnesota withdrew the offer. The problem, according to key players involved in the search, was Segal’s opinion of the Israel-Hamas war — namely an October 13 article he wrote arguing that Israel’s ongoing attacks on the Gaza strip were a “textbook case of genocide.”

Piper Hutchinson
Louisiana Illuminator

Excerpt: Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has enacted a law to exclude acts of civil disobedience from free speech protections on college campuses.  

Senate Bill 294 by Sen. Valarie Hodges, R-Denham Springs, was billed as a pro-free speech proposal. The bill was designed to “shore up protections” for campus speech, Hodges said.

Students and faculty opposed the bill because they fear it will criminalize free speech. The new law specifically excludes any act that carries a criminal penalty from free speech protections, meaning campus free speech policies would no longer protect acts of civil disobedience.

Samuel J. Abrams & Steven McGuire
Minding the Campus

Excerpt: All of this might have been enough to convince the people who run Harvard that they needed to make some changes, and, in fairness, they have made a few small ones. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences did away with mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring but replaced them with a service statement that could easily be used to weed out candidates on the same grounds. And it partially adopted institutional neutrality, leaving out a key and currently essential part: that political divestment to get the university to take sides is off the table.

But, despite these small steps, or even because of how small they were, it was reasonable to remain skeptical about whether Harvard had really understood the message. Professor and Dean of Social Science Lawrence D. Bobo has made it eminently clear that it did not get through to him.

Haley Strack
National Review

Excerpt: The University of Michigan and the City University of New York (CUNY) failed to properly assess whether anti-Israel campus protests made for hostile environments for students, faculty, and staff, the Department of Education said on Monday.

“OCR found no evidence that the university complied with its Title VI requirements to assess whether incidents individually or cumulatively created a hostile environment for students, faculty, or staff, and if so, to take steps reasonably calculated to end the hostile environment, remedy its effects, and prevent its recurrence,” the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which investigated 75 complaints against the University of Michigan and nine against CUNY, said.

Liam Knox
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will not renew the contract of a professor whose classes they recorded without his permission, university media relations director Beth Lutz confirmed.

Larry Chavis has taught economics at the university’s Kenan-Flagler Business School on a yearly contract since 2006. In April, he was notified that his classes had been secretly recorded by a camera in his lecture hall, and that footage of those lessons had been used in a professional review. The review was prompted by “reports concerning class content and conduct … over the past few months,” associate dean Christian Lundblad wrote in a letter to Chavis.

Lawrence D. Bobo
The Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: Having witnessed the appallingly rough manner in which prominent affiliates, including one former University president, publicly denounced Harvard’s students and present leadership, this first question must be answered: Is it outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct for a faculty member to excoriate University leadership, faculty, staff, or students with the intent to arouse external intervention into University business? And does the broad publication of such views cross a line into sanctionable violations of professional conduct?

Yes it is and yes it does.