National Free Speech News & Commentary

Pamela Paul
New York Times

Excerpt: The same week that a U.C. Berkeley protest ended in violence, with doors broken, people allegedly injured, a guest lecture organized by Jewish students canceled and attendees evacuated by the police through an underground passageway, a group of academics gathered across the bay at Stanford to discuss restoring inclusive civil discourse on campus. The underlying question: In today’s heated political environment, is that even possible?

Over the course of two packed days of moderated and free discussion, we would try to test it out.

Francesca Block
The Free Press

Excerpt: An activist group in California has paid nearly 100 public high schoolers $1,400 each to learn how to fight for racial and social justice, The Free Press has learned.

Contracts between Long Beach Unified School District and Californians for Justice from 2019 to 2023, exclusively obtained by The Free Press, show the school district used taxpayer funds to pay the group nearly $2 million to facilitate equity and leadership development training for students and teachers. In addition to the student stipends, the contracts also allocated a total of $20,200 to 13 parents for participating in the group’s programs.

Joanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: As protests raged on college campuses after the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October, Columbia University set out to codify clear-cut guidelines for on-campus demonstrations. But the announcement of the Student Group Event Policy and Procedure plan drew swift backlash for being overly restrictive; among other things, it required “special events”—including any gathering expected to draw “high attendance/capacity”—to be registered two weeks in advance.

Four months later, the university has released new guidelines, called the Interim University Policy for Safe Demonstrations. It was born in part out of concerns that the previous iteration had been established too “hastily,” said Dr. Jeanine D’Armiento, chair of Columbia’s University Senate executive committee and an associate professor of medicine in anesthesiology.

The Editors
National Review

Excerpt: Last week, the University of Florida peremptorily announced that it had ended its ill-fated experiment with DEI. “The University of Florida,” the college’s missive confirmed, has “closed the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, eliminated DEI positions and administrative appointments, and halted DEI-focused contracts with outside vendors.”

As a practical matter, one would not wish the men and women of Tallahassee to micromanage every last feature of academic life in Gainesville, but, evidently, that is not what is happening in this case. Instead, the state’s authorities are establishing minimum guidelines for how taxpayers’ money can be spent, and they are doing so in a manner that upholds the most precious of America’s ideals.

Washington Times
Stephen Dinan

The University of Virginia shells out $20 million a year to employees who work on diversity, equity and inclusion, according to a new analysis of the public school’s spending.

OpenTheBooks.com said the university has at least 235 employees whose job titles signal they do DEI work for the school.

They are paid a total of $15 million, and the state-funded school spends another $5 million on annual benefits, according to OpenTheBooks’ calculations.

Ben Raab
Yale News

Excerpt: Timothy Snyder evacuated his “Hitler, Stalin, and Us” lecture on Thursday afternoon after a Communist activist group entered the classroom and would not leave.

Around 10 demonstrators affiliated with the Revolutionary Communist Party showed up at the classroom in William Harkness Hall five minutes after the start of class and began shouting at Snyder while holding up signs and recording students. “It seemed like they just wanted to shout Professor Snyder down, not engage in any sort of discussion,” William Wang ’26, a student in the class, told the News. “After a few minutes of shouting it was clear they weren’t gonna go away. Eventually, we just left and went to another classroom.”