National Free Speech News & Commentary

Nick Gillespie
Reason

Excerpt: Ted and Courtney Balaker are the team behind the new documentary The Coddling of the American Mind. Based on the 2018 best-selling book by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, the film follows a series of students as they navigate life on today's highly charged college campuses. I spoke with Courtney and Ted, who started his video career as one of the first hires at Reason TV, about the Gen Z mental health crisis, free speech, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs, the oppressor-victim worldview, and why they chose to host the film on the innovative platform Substack rather than a more traditional venue.

FIRE

Excerpt: The Senate is gearing up to vote on the Kids Online Safety Act as early as tomorrow. FIRE urges opposition to both the Senate (S. 1409) and House (H.R. 7891) versions of the bill because they treat Americans’ speech not as a fundamental right and an indispensable ingredient of human progress, but as a hazardous product.

This opens the door to insidious government regulation of speech of both minors and adults, which the bill enables by empowering the Federal Trade Commission to define how social media platforms can operate.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: In the summer of 2022, Florida newspapers reported on the strange appearance of $3 million in one-time funds from Florida’s GOP-controlled state Legislature for something called the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civics Education at the University of Florida. The university said it hadn’t asked for this new entity.

Two years later, this center—backed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis and now embraced by university officials—is rapidly expanding to become a UF college. But the center has remained beset with controversy, from its murky origins to university investigations of its alleged faculty opponents to a summer Faculty Senate approval of its degrees that left some professors feeling “railroaded.”

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: After several years of effort, graduate students getting paid for research or teaching at the University of Chicago joined a labor union.  Because they couldn’t form a union de novo but had to join an existing one, they became dues-paying members of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, Local 11o3.

But joining the union came with an unexpected downside: unions can take political and ideological positions, and as a member of one (qualified students are required to join and pay union dues), you implicitly sign on to those positions.  And you may not want to do that.  In the case at hand, the Union has taken pro-Palestinian positions, and some students, especially Jewish ones, don’t want to sign on to these positions. So a group called “Graduate Students for Academic Freedom” has sued the union, alleging that the union makes them engage in implicit endorsement of the union’s positions.

Jonathan Zimmerman
Philadelphia Inquirer

Excerpt: How should schools regulate what students post on the internet?
I don’t know. But here’s what I do know: We’ll never craft good policies around online student speech unless we listen to what students have to say.

That’s been the missing voice in the controversy in Great Valley, a Chester County school district where middle school students made 22 TikTok accounts impersonating their teachers. Some of the fake videos were truly horrible, casting the teachers as pedophiles or depicting them in sexual encounters with each other.

Steven Porter
Boston Globe

Excerpt: Prosecutors are pressing forward with formal criminal charges against most of the 12 people who were arrested when pro-Palestinian demonstrators attempted to establish an encampment May 1 at the University of New Hampshire.

A prosecutor with the UNH Police Department filed formal complaints Wednesday against eight defendants, including six who were UNH students at the time of their arrest, alleging they committed misdemeanor trespassing and disorderly conduct by refusing to comply with a dispersal order, according to court records.