National Free Speech News & Commentary

Jeremy W. Peters
New York Times

Excerpt: Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each recently announced that they will no longer require diversity statements as a part of their hiring process for faculty posts.

The decisions by two of the nation’s leading institutions of higher learning could influence others to follow suit.

Jessie Appleby
FIRE

Excerpt: Despite the real benefits of virtual meetings, they are not a replacement for real life. At its best, they facilitate meetings and communication that otherwise could not have occurred. But a screen cannot replicate the experience of an in-person gathering. In short, virtual events and in-person events are not interchangeable.

Yet many universities have started treating them as such. In recent years, FIRE has seen schools increasingly rely on the availability of virtual meeting platforms to evade their constitutional and other free speech obligations to provide sufficient security for events to proceed without sustained disruption.

Kurt Streeter
New York Times

Excerpt: Waves of boos, angry chants and the steady rhythm of feet pounding on metal seats were upending the graduation ceremony at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Viva, viva Palestina!” students sang out. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Israel’s apartheid has got to go!”

Once it was over and most had left the school’s low-slung football stadium, Berkeley’s chancellor, Carol Christ, sat near the podium in a folding chair. She is silver-haired and soft-spoken, a soon-to-retire 80-year-old former English professor with an unusual background for the modern college president: Her views on free speech first crystallized during her years as a student protester in the turbulent 1960s.

Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Louisiana governor Jeff Landry signed a bill into law Wednesday that grants him new powers to directly appoint board chairs at the state’s public colleges and universities. Landry, a Republican, then immediately ousted University of Louisiana System board chair Jimmy Clarke and re-appointed Mark Romero, who held the role under previous governor John Bel Edwards in 2019.

The bill landed on Landry’s desk on May 31 after flying through the state legislature with strong Republican support. Sponsored by Republican senator Valarie Hodges, the controversial bill reflects a growing push from conservative lawmakers to exercise greater influence in higher education governance.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: On Monday morning, the student-edited Columbia Law Review published its latest issue online. Hours later, the website became a blank white space with a one-line note saying, “Website is under maintenance.”

The issue had contained an article by Rabea Eghbariah, the same Palestinian Harvard University law degree candidate who had a different piece rejected by the Harvard Law Review in November after an unusual editorial intervention. Unlike what happened at Harvard, Eghbariah received the Columbia Law Review’s imprimatur for this new article and saw it published. But not for long. On Monday morning—seven hours after the article was published, according to one outgoing student editor, Erika Lopez—the Review’s Board of Directors, which includes the law school’s dean and other faculty members and alumni, took down the Review’s entire website due to Eghbariah's article.

Benjamin Mazer
The Atlantic

Excerpt: “People will die if doctors misdiagnose patients.” This is true as far as it goes. But the recent news that prompted Elon Musk to share this observation on X was not precisely about medical errors. It was about what he might call the “woke mind virus.” A story by Aaron Sibarium in The Washington Free Beacon had revealed complaints that UCLA’s medical school was admitting applicants partly based on race—a practice that has long been outlawed in California public schools. And this process wasn’t just discriminatory, the story argued; it was potentially disastrous for the public.