National Free Speech News & Commentary

Ryan Ansloan
FIRE

Excerpt: Over the last academic year, the University of Pennsylvania has experienced fierce protests, congressional hearings, and outcry from students, faculty, and donors that resulted in the shortest tenure of a president in the history of the private, Ivy League university. Now, in the shadow of that turmoil, Penn seems prepared to abandon its storied commitment to free expression.

Alyssa Lukpat and Nicholas Hatcher
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: A new round of pro-Palestinian demonstrations swept the University of California, Los Angeles, where 25 protesters were arrested after setting up an encampment, the latest outburst of campus tensions over the Israel-Hamas war.

Brian Rosenberg
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: I suspect that I am not the only former college president who has experienced a mild bout of PTSD during the past several months, as the frequency, intensity, and visibility of attacks on presidents have increased to a level that would have been difficult to imagine even on my worst days.

Alyssa Lukpat and Nicholas Hatcher
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: A new round of pro-Palestinian demonstrations swept the University of California, Los Angeles, where 25 protesters were arrested after setting up an encampment, the latest outburst of campus tensions over the Israel-Hamas war.

The UCLA Police Department said about 100 people put up tents and barriers Monday afternoon and moved the encampment twice after being ordered to disperse. The protesters made enough noise to disrupt students taking final exams nearby, police said. The people in the demonstration were affiliated with a student group on campus, according to the police department.

Nathan Honeycutt
FIRE

Excerpt: Confidence in higher education has plummeted to its lowest level ever according to the results of two new national polls commissioned by FIRE and conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.

Per the polls, American confidence in higher education has plummeted over the past year, reaching record lows after months of campus protests over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Congressional hearings about anti-Semitism on college campuses.

Megan McArdle
Washington Post

Excerpt: After a decade of ever-escalating commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion, elite campuses are reversing course. It's amazing to watch such an abrupt volte-face. What’s even more amazing is how far things went beforehand and how long the correction took to arrive.

Such double-think regimes are vulnerable to what economist Timur Kuran calls a “preference cascade in reverse”: As people realize their neighbors share their skepticism, they start voicing their true opinions, an effect that dominoes until the whole regime collapses.