National Free Speech News & Commentary

Bill Ackman
The Free Press

Excerpt: In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.

I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem. It was simply a troubling warning sign—it was the “canary in the coal mine”—despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.  I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

Robert Corn-Revere
Reason Magazine

Excerpt:  Freedom of speech on American college campuses is now facing great challenges in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and Israel's bombardment of Gaza. According to some, the outpouring of ugly, inexplicable, and vituperative speech unleashed by these events means that now is the time to abandon the concept of free speech at our universities. Apparently, to these "sunshine constitutional scholars," speech can only be free if it is polite and unchallenging.

There is no need to infantilize students by telling them they are simply too brittle to fully participate in the heated debates going on in the world around them. Instead, we need clear leadership from university presidents and others that stresses our commitment to free expression. This commitment must remain strong especially in turbulent times.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: The litany of college wokeness, and especially the harm it causes, is now being discussed by the mainstream media, including the Atlantic and the Washington Post. Here, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the most respected venue for discussing college affairs, published a long piece (ca. 6000 words) discussing how “a decade of ideological transformation”—and that means “wokeness”—is no longer off limits to criticism.

James Hankins
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Claudine Gay, the president of my university, is under attack for academic dishonesty. She is charged with several instances of plagiarism, in her dissertation and other published work, in addition to data falsification. As of this writing it seems not unlikely that she may be fired or asked to resign.

What concerns me is that the public discussion so far hasn’t shown a sufficient appreciation of how serious academic honesty is in research institutions. Some of Ms. Gay’s supporters treat the allegations as trivial, dismissing them as the product of right-wing scandal-mongering. That is a historically uninformed view. Research universities, and the wider modern project of improving human life through research and scholarship, depend on academic honesty.

Doug Lederman
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The U.S. Education Department has added George Mason University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to the list of colleges and universities it is investigating for alleged discrimination based on shared ancestry.

In updating the list, the department does not say what possible violations it is investigating under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires federally funded institutions to protect students from discrimination based on race, color or national origin.

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita
Boston Review

Excerpt: While intolerance is a matter of culture, policy and administrative actions play a role in creating the culture. When university leaders who enthusiastically made statements about Black Lives Matter, knowing that such statements would likely discourage free expression of dissenting views on related issues, later assert a deep commitment to free expression concerning genocide of the Jews, they appear to be cynically picking and choosing their principles to suit short-run exigencies.

In this sense, university leaders are lying in a bed of their own making. I suspect at this point many wish they could give something like my First Amendment answer but cannot without facing charges of hypocrisy. One important question, then, is how they might get from here to there.