National Free Speech News & Commentary

Eugene Volokh
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: An excerpt from an opinion piece that she wrote at the Washington Post Dec. 10, but that I had missed:

    I was one of three co-chairs of Harvard's Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, which in 2018 delivered a strategic framework for the campus…. Across the country, DEI bureaucracies have been responsible for numerous assaults on common sense, but the values of lowercase-i inclusion and lowercase-d diversity remain foundational to healthy democracy….

    We wrote [in our report]: "Our shared pursuits … depend on the open and direct expression of ideas and on criteria of evaluation established by the judgments of experts. Excellence therefore also requires academic freedom. Inclusion and academic freedom — these principles are linked in each being necessary to the pursuit of truth."

Jeannie Suk Gersen
New Yorker

Excerpt: On January 2nd, after months of turmoil around Harvard’s response to Hamas’s attack on Israel, and weeks of turmoil around accusations of plagiarism, Claudine Gay resigned as the university’s president. Any hope that this might relieve the outsized attention on Harvard proved to be illusory. The week after Gay stepped down, two congressional committees demanded documents and explanations from Harvard, on topics ranging from antisemitism, free speech, discrimination, and discipline, to admissions, donations, budgets, and legal settlements.

Some at Harvard might say this is a crisis sparked by external forces: the government, donors, and the public. But it developed long before Gay became president and won’t end with her fall. Over time, Harvard, like many other universities, has allowed the core academic mission of research, intellectual inquiry, and teaching to be subordinated to other values that, though important, should never have been allowed to work against it.

John O. McGinnis
Law & Liberty

Excerpt: The resignation of Claudine Gay provides a window into many pathologies of elite universities—antisemitism on campus, the prioritization of DEI over merit, and plagiarism among academics. But it also reflects their poor governance.

Governance at elite universities is insular, unaccountable, and marred by conflicts of interest that prevent it from being focused on the historic mission of the university, encapsulated on Harvard’s coat of arms: seeking truth. Many nonprofits face similar structural difficulties that create a gap between the performance of their leadership and the fulfillment of their mission, but elite universities face added difficulties.

Hank Reichman
Academe Blog

Excerpt: Today the New York Times published an article recounting the continuing struggle at Barnard College, the women’s college of Columbia University in New York, over the academic freedom and free speech rights of faculty and students.  

While perhaps more draconian than some, the Barnard measures are, unfortunately, just one example of a broad assault on academic freedom and campus free speech focused at the moment on pro-Palestinian expression that some may construe as antisemitic (but not all Jewish scholars do; see, for example, here).  That assault, however, will have an impact on more than expression concerning the current Mideast morass.  Well before October 7, many university administrations sought to curb faculty and student expression that they fear may alienate important external players: trustees, alumni, donors, or politicians.

Sharon Otterman
New York Times

Excerpt: Three weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College in New York posted a statement on its departmental website in support of the Palestinian people. Below the statement, the professors posted links to academic work supporting their view that the struggle of Palestinians against “settler colonial war, occupation and apartheid” was also a feminist issue. Two days later, they found that section of the webpage had been removed, without warning, by Barnard administrators.

What happened next has sparked a crisis over academic freedom and free expression at Barnard at a time when the Israel-Hamas conflict has led to tense protests on American college campuses and heated discussions about what constitutes acceptable speech.

Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea

Excerpt: ACLU National Legal Director David Cole has a review of my and Rikki Schlott’s book, “The Canceling of the American Mind,” coming out in the February 8 edition of the New York Review of Books. Overall I thought it was quite positive, but Cole made some arguments — which we actually hear quite often — that I think need addressing.

I always welcome good-faith pushback — especially when it gives me an opportunity to go into more depth on why Rikki and I are so concerned about the current situation in higher education. All that said, here are some quotes from Cole’s review that I’d like to respond to.