The University of Arkansas’ shameful capitulation to political pressure betrays its commitment to Professor Suski and threatens the rights of all who teach, study, and work there. The message to every dean, professor, and researcher is unmistakable: Your job hinges on whether politicians approve of your views.
Political interference in academic decision making must be rejected. When universities make hiring decisions based on politics, left or right, academic freedom gets weaker and campuses grow quieter.
Ilya Somin
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine
Excerpt: Yesterday, federal District Judge William K. Sessions, III, of the District of Vermont ordered the immediate release of Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, whom ICE had detained and slated for deportation based on her anti-Israel speech.
In earlier posts on this topic, I have urged universities to file lawsuits challenging Trump's speech-based deportation policy, rather than letting students like Ozturk fend for themselves. I was happy to see that many schools (including my undergraduate alma mater Amherst College) filed an amicus brief supporting a lawsuit brought against the policy by the American Association of University Professors (the court recently issued a preliminary ruling in favor of AAUP, allowing the case to go forward). But universities should do more to protect their students.
Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea
Excerpt: As regular ERI readers and followers of FIRE will know, I’ve been defending free speech on campus since 2001 — nearly all of FIRE’s 25-year history. In 2022, FIRE expanded its mission, going from being the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. This was in no small part because we grew more and more concerned that the free speech crises we were dealing with on campus could and would spill over to other areas of our country.
I am speaking about bias reporting systems, sometimes called bias response teams, which are essentially snitch hotlines where people can report others for “offensive” or “hateful” speech. The act of doing this to your fellow Americans over protected speech would be bad enough, but these systems go further. They often consist not only of administrators, but also law enforcement.
Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley’s Blog
Excerpt: Last night, I discussed a new executive order signed by President Donald Trump that included an extension of his earlier move against “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies to the area of higher education. The order makes direct reference to the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023) banning the use of race in college admissions and instructs the Departments of Education and Justice to investigate any circumvention of the prohibition by colleges and universities.
The order effectively carries out the mandate declared by Chief Justice John Roberts: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” Since the EO has not been officially posted on the government website, I have included the full language below.
Rose Horowitch
The Atlantic
Excerpt: No one would be surprised to learn that an elite university has a plan to counteract the structural barriers to the advancement of a minority group. Johns Hopkins University’s latest diversity initiative, however, has managed to put a new spin on a familiar concept: The minority group in question is conservative professors.
Several elite red-state public universities have recently established academic centers designed to attract conservative scholars. And institutions that haven’t sought out conservative faculty may soon find new reasons to do so. The Trump administration has demanded that Harvard hire additional conservative professors or risk losing even more of its federal funding.
By Leslie Spencer ’79
Leonard Milberg ’53 collects rare things of scholarly import. In his 30th reunion book entry, he says, “I have belatedly, but passionately discovered books, prints, and the Princeton University Rare Book Library.” Over the years his expertise grew, as did his collections, which came to include 19th-century American prints and drawings, book collections of American poetry, Irish poetry, prose and theatre as well as two Judaica collections. Princeton is the lucky beneficiary of over 13,000 of these items, and over the decades Milberg has organized eleven exhibits at Princeton and paid for their accompanying publications. He often looked to Princeton faculty and other academics with relevant expertise to shape the content and provide context for these projects. And along the way he endowed two Princeton professorships. In short, Milberg has been for decades a devotee not only of history, literature, art and the knowledge one can derive from them, but also of Princeton. Over many decades his philanthropic endeavors have been completed without incident, and with immeasurable benefit to Princeton students and the wider community.
By Stuart Taylor, Jr., Co-founder, Princetonians for Free Speech
Old-fashioned civil liberties champions who have not paid much attention since 2010 or so might be surprised to learn that the Obama Administration used Title IX sharply to curb free speech on campus (as well as due process for students accused of sexual harassment and assault).
Amelia Freund
Princetonians for Free Speech
My name is Amelia Freund and I am honored to be serving as President of the Princeton Open Campus Coalition (POCC) this year. An Army brat hailing from the DC-Maryland-Virginia area, I am a member of the great class of 2028, the Butler College Class Council, and the Politics Department. In high school I read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill several times over in my philosophy courses, each time I found it engaging and inspirational. I was particularly drawn in by Mill’s defense of free speech. He believed that for an idea to be true, it must be continuously discussed and debated, requiring broad protections for civic discourse. His argument resonated with me a great deal, and has carried me to countless engagements with freedom of speech since then, both in and out of the classroom.
The U.S. Department of Education will continue to target diversity, equity and inclusion programs in colleges and schools under Title VI despite a court block on its controversial anti-DEI Dear Colleague letter.
That letter, issued a year ago, announced the department’s policy interpreting Title VI — which protects students from discrimination based on race, ethnicity and national origin — to prohibit DEI programs. It said some college and schools’ race-based equity programs discriminate against White and Asian students and could result in federal funding loss.
Peter Berkowitz
RealClearPolitics
Excerpt: As with many things Trump, the administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” provoked accusations of authoritarian takeover of vital American institutions. And, as with many things Trump, the administration’s compact overreached in pursuit of a worthy goal, giving critics ammunition to oppose urgently needed reform.
By Marisa Warman Hirschfield ‘27
“STUPID AND UGLY WINDMILLS ARE KILLING NEW JERSEY,” wrote President Trump in a recent Truth Social post. “STOP THE WINDMILLS.” A likely interpretation is that Trump blames wind power for New Jersey's 28% energy price hike.
Kevin Carey
The Atlantic
Excerpt: In March 2019, a team of investigators from the U.S. Department of Education’s fraud-prevention team arrived at a Houston trade school for what was supposed to be a routine inspection. Several of the students the team wanted to interview, however, were nowhere to be found. At the end of a long and frustrating day, the investigators headed back to their car. That’s when two of the missing students appeared in the parking lot. They wanted to talk in a place where school administrators couldn’t overhear them.
Tal Fortgang
Manhattan Institute
Excerpt: No one can pinpoint when the fight against diversity, equity, and inclusion started – if it can even be disentangled from related campaigns against affirmative action, minority contracting, and other forms of identity favoritism – but it’s hardly a nascent movement by now. The Supreme Court has ruled that affirmative action, as long practiced in higher education, is illegal. The Trump administration is rooting out racial favoritism in government programs and contracting alongside states that are foregrounding merit in all public investments.
However, to achieve its goals and maintain its victories, the anti-DEI movement must entrench its competing set of principles in non-governmental institutions – and ultimately in Americans’ hearts and minds.
Nitasha Tiku
Washington Post
Excerpt: Influential tech investor and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen recently said universities will “pay the price” for promoting diversity and allegedly discriminating against supporters of President Donald Trump, according to messages he sent to a group chat with White House officials and technology leaders reviewed by The Washington Post.
The billionaire’s messages also cited Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, a respected institution at the heart of Silicon Valley that has incubated tech companies such as Google. Andreessen and his wife have donated millions of dollars to the school.
Marisa Warman Hirschfield ‘27
Princetonians for Free Speech
Excerpt: On April 22nd, Yechiel M. Leiter, Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S., delivered a lecture entitled “The Demonization of Israel and the Rise of Anti-semitism” to approximately seventy-five attendees in McCosh 10. The event was co-sponsored by Chabad, the Center for Jewish Life, B’Artzeinu, and Princetonians for Free Speech. Around twenty P-safe officers and Free Expression Facilitators populated McCosh courtyard in advance of the talk. Every entrance was monitored by security, and fences were set up outside the lecture hall as boundaries for protestors. I attended in my capacity as a Writing Fellow for PFS.
Ross Marchand
FIRE
Excerpt: Great news: UConn School of Medicine administrators are going scalpels down on the school’s attempt to forcibly transplant politics and ideology into its incoming student body.
In 2022, UConn finalized its own version of the Hippocratic Oath, which includes a promise to “actively support policies that promote social justice and specifically work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination and racism.” Most recently, UConn required the incoming class of 2028 to pledge allegiance not simply to patient care, but to support diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic
Excerpt: On President Donald Trump’s first day back in the White House, he issued an executive order ending diversity, equity, and inclusion in the federal government. Its sweeping language forbids DEI “mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities,” and orders the termination of all DEI positions—hundreds if not thousands of roles. Trump and his allies are also trying to curtail DEI in corporations that contract with the state, colleges that get federal funds, and more.
The ambition of these anti-DEI efforts mirrors the earlier, heavy-handed push, including by the Biden administration, to embed DEI practices into almost all of America’s most important institutions. It also underscores just how widely and variably the term DEI is now used across society.
AAUP Statement
Excerpt: Aside from this resolution on divestment, the AAUP has never determined that the neutrality of institutions is either necessary for, or incompatible with, the principles of academic freedom. For more than a half century, we have instead chosen to emphasize the complexity of the issues involved, the dangers that can attend either approach, and the necessity of making institutional decisions with an eye to their effects on academic freedom and shared governance. This statement reaffirms that long-standing approach.
Julian Mark
New York Times
Excerpt: A coalition of professors, diversity officers and restaurant worker advocates filed a federal lawsuit Monday in a bid to block President Donald Trump’s executive orders that target diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the U.S. government, the private sector and academia, alleging that he exceeded his authority in issuing them.
Sara Weissman
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: "Chaos is the goal,” Mike Gavin, president of Delta College in Michigan, told a Zoom room full of higher ed professionals on a January afternoon. “These external forces are trying to cause chaos to distract us from our mission.”
By “chaos” he meant the onslaught of anti-DEI legislation sweeping the country—state laws requiring universities to scrub diversity statements from their hiring processes, identify DEI-related courses and programs for scrutiny, and cut personnel, centers and offices dedicated to supporting underrepresented student groups.
