National Free Speech News & Commentary

Jonathan H. Adler
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Professor Lawrence Bobo, Dean of Social Science and the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, has an article in the Harvard Crimson on the proper limits of faculty speech that has to be read to be believed.

Douglas Soule
Tallahassee Democrat

Excerpt: An attorney representing education officials appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis Friday told a federal appeals court that Florida lawmakers, if they so choose, can prohibit professors from criticizing the governor in the classroom.

“In the classroom, the professor’s speech is the government’s speech, and the government can restrict professors on a content-wide basis and restrict them from offering viewpoints that are contrary,” said Charles Cooper of the Cooper & Kirk law firm, responding to a judge posing that scenario.

Jessica Wills
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: At the end of May, Stanford’s faculty senate formally voted to approve free expression and institutional neutrality statements, making Stanford the third university in the last month to put into writing its dedication to these principles.

The new Statement on Freedom of Expression proclaims that the “freedom to explore and present new, unconventional, and even unpopular ideas is essential to the academic mission of the university.” The language in Stanford’s statement closely mirrors the “Chicago Statement” on free expression, which FIRE considers to be the gold standard for campus free speech policies.

Liam Knox
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Almost as soon as the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action last June, Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey fired off a response. Within hours of the rulings in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill cases (SFFA), Bailey ordered the state’s public colleges and universities to comply—which in his view meant removing race-conscious policies “not just [in] college admissions, but also scholarships,” an extrapolation that many legal experts say is unnecessary.

University officials quickly began amending institutional grants and scholarships across the system’s four campuses, according to Christian Basi, the Missouri system’s director of public affairs. Since then, they’ve worked methodically to bring other awards in line—including endowed scholarships that donors specified should go only to members of certain racial or ethnic groups.

Zach Kessel
National Review

Excerpt: Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Harvard University leaders issued a statement professing to be “heartbroken” over the October 7 Hamas massacre and expressing hope that the university could play a role in fostering dialogue around the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

That statement — roundly criticized as lacking moral clarity —  contrasted sharply with the righteous indignation the university displayed in response to the 2016 presidential election, the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, the killing of George Floyd, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those statements, of course, drew furious criticism from Americans who don’t happen to share the political commitments common in Cambridge.

Daniel Diermeier
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Harvard University announced last week that it will no longer “issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function” as an academic institution. This is welcome news for all of us who have long been concerned about politicization of universities and the resulting erosion of free expression in academia.
     
Yet [the] new policy makes a crucial omission that is at the core of the current controversy on campuses. Students at universities nationwide have called on their institutions to join the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. According to the Harvard working group co-chairs, it didn’t “address, much less solve, the hard problem of when the university should or shouldn’t divest its endowment funds from a given portfolio.