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Eugene Volokh
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason

Excerpt: Loggins sued Stanford for race and religious discrimination and related claims, on the theory that "Stanford would not have investigated his class sessions, suspended him, publicly announced its investigation and his suspension, or refused to extend his contract '[b]ut for the fact that [Dr. Loggins] [is] black, Muslim and spoke out against Israeli policies that violated the Geneva Convention[.]'" But the court concluded that Loggins hadn't alleged sufficient evidence that Stanford's treatment was motivated by his race or religion.

Alyssa Lukpat
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: A federal judge ruled the University of California, Los Angeles, must ensure equal access to campus for Jewish students after some alleged in a lawsuit they were blocked by protesters at this spring’s pro-Palestinian encampments.

Maggie Hicks
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Under a new Indiana law, public colleges are required to provide students a venue to complain if they think a professor isn’t protecting their right to “intellectual diversity.” In Utah, the Board of Higher Education will now conduct a biannual review of public institutions to ensure they’re complying with that state’s new law. And public colleges in Texas must submit an annual report to the state Legislature outlining how they’ve complied with bans on diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.

Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder
Banished, Substack

Excerpt: This is snake eating its own tail territory. A standard definition of "privilege" (one of DEI's core concepts) is disavowed because it conflicts with "inclusion" & "belonging." What happened here is, alas, entirely predictable, now that institutions have embraced such expansive definitions of “inclusion,” making grand promises to create campus environments where “any individual or group feels welcomed, respected, supported and valued” at all times.

Also note the wild concept creep in effect here regarding what counts as harm. A short riff on “privilege” is so “hurtful” that it demands a formal apology! And ultimately ends with a resignation.

Erec Smith
Journal of Free Black Thought, Substack

Excerpt: On March 7, 2024, FBT President Erec Smith testified before Congress about DEI in higher education in an address to the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development. We present a transcript of his remarks, with hyperlinks, below. A video of his remarks is available.

Alecia Taylor
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Republicans made the case in a congressional hearing on Thursday that campus diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts promote discrimination, echoing lawmakers at the state level who are working to restrict such practices.

Republican politicians and other critics increasingly argue that DEI can be racist and sexist because its model sorts identity groups based on physical characteristics and historical privilege, creating a system that pits the “oppressors” against the “oppressed.” Thursday’s hearing, held by the U.S. House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development, continued that line of attack — with discussion dominated by conservative voices opposed to DEI.

Jim Martin
The News & Observer

Excerpt: Recently, all Davidson College student-athletes were required to watch a film entitled, “I’m Not Racist, Am I?” Its provocative message disavows “The Dream.” Regardless of what you think, say or do, it insists that if you’re white, you are racist. If you’re of color, you cannot be racist. In their lexicon, “racist” is just a synonym for “white.”

Oddly, some activists believe this fiction. They want to indoctrinate America’s youth for the noble goal of eliminating racism. Great. Then why insist upon bogus definitions that evoke only insult and injury? How can racism be eliminated if some of us remain melanin challenged? Their Cynical Race Theory is malicious and unworkable.

Excerpt: A war is raging over “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Opponents and supporters of DEI have very different ideas about what it is. “DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism,” hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman tweets. “Good businesses look where others don’t, to find the employees that will put your business in the best possible position to succeed,” businessman Mark Cuban counters.

Both men have a point. Some of what happens under the DEI banner is truly objectionable, even illegal—hiring, promotion and admissions standards under which race trumps qualifications, training sessions that create a hostile environment for whites. But as companies, universities and other organizations weed out these practices, they should be careful that the parts of DEI that the majority of us agree on don’t become collateral damage.

On August 29, Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, spoke alongside Princeton University president Christopher Eisgruber at a mandatory freshman-orientation event ostensibly meant to highlight the university’s commitment to freedom of speech and academic freedom. More than 1,000 Princeton freshmen were required to attend this event as a part of their regular sequence of orientation activities; I was there as an undergraduate academic adviser for freshmen and out of my own personal curiosity.

Ashlynn Warta
James G. Martin Center for Academic Freedom

Excerpt: In July of 2020, UNC-Chapel Hill’s chancellor sent an email to the university’s leadership cabinets requesting responses to three questions regarding “structural racism.” Through public records requests, the Martin Center obtained a copy of the many responses submitted over the following days by Chapel Hill’s academic and administrative units.

Our previous article on this subject introduced the chancellor’s DEI questionnaire and examined some of the more extreme proposals supplied by respondents. Below, we look in greater detail at the “solutions” proposed by Chapel Hill’s various divisions and schools.

By Harrison Rosenthal
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Excerpt: In a recent turn of events, FIRE’s understanding of actions by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Medicine regarding recommendations from a diversity, equity, and inclusion task force have come into question.

Press Release
Knight First Amendment Institution, Columbia University 

Excerpt: Multiple universities have recently announced that they will consider or rely on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA’s) definition of antisemitism in policing speech on campus. 

The following can be attributed to Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “It’s disappointing that some of the nation’s leading institutions of higher education are agreeing to curtail and punish criticism of Israel in the name of fighting discrimination. As major free speech groups have recognized, using the IHRA definition of antisemitism to delineate the outer boundaries of free speech will have the effect of proscribing or deterring legitimate political speech and scholarship."

Bianca Quilantan and Madina Touré
Politico

Excerpt: Leaders who once helmed the nation’s most prestigious universities are homing in on a message for their successors: resist, defend and litigate.

That formula, they argue, is the only way to survive an administration eager to extract fundamental concessions from schools that go far beyond addressing stated concerns about antisemitism. In the three months since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has demanded that some of these private institutions end diversity programming, change admissions requirements, toughen student discipline policies and audit some academic programs.

Rebecca E. Karl
Academe Blog

Excerpt: The NYU administration dissimulates and even prevaricates. Our provost, our deans, and our spokesman have each proclaimed, publicly and behind closed doors, that the newly issued guidance on student speech, sprung upon the university on August 22, “changes nothing.” (Our president has gone AWOL, apparently remaining only in her own echo chamber.)

Despite the protestations, all signs are that things have changed fundamentally. In addition to the walling off of swathes of what used to be public gathering spaces on and near our campus, as well as the newly severe proscriptions on permitted assembly in or around university buildings, this new guidance doubles down on specific conflations. It broadly equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism and specifically names Zionism a “code word” for probable racist intent.

Guest Contributors
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: We write as bereaved members of the Princeton community — faculty, students, alumni, and staff — to express our unequivocal outrage over the tragic loss of Israeli and Palestinian lives during the past week as the region seems to careen uncontrollably towards an all-out regional conflagration. There is never any justification for the targeting of civilians, whether it be assaults on Israeli towns or the aerial bombardment and total siege of the Gaza Strip.

Tyler Coward
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression 

Excerpt: Late last month, the student chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine at George Mason University posted a video on a social media account that criticized U.S. foreign policy and Israel. The video (now removed), which apparently stylistically mimicked a Hamas video, included phrases such as “genocidal Zionist State,” “the belly of the beast,” and “from the river to the sea.” It also specifically addressed conditions in Gaza and GMU’s alleged oppression of pro-Palestinian protestors. 

Rather than protecting student political discourse, GMU demanded the SJP chapter take down the video explicitly because its language ran afoul of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s vague definition of antisemitism, which has been incorporated into GMU’s anti-discrimination policy.

Tyler Coward, Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Freedom thrives when the people, not bureaucrats, decide which ideas are worthy of discussion, debate, or support. As FIRE has long argued, campus reform is necessary. But overreaching government coercion that tries to end-run around the First Amendment to impose an official orthodoxy is unacceptable. And the White House’s new Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education raises red flags.

The compact includes troubling language, such as calling on institutions to eliminate departments deemed to “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” Let’s be clear: Speech that offends or criticizes political views is not violence. Conflating words with violence undermines both free speech and efforts to combat real threats.

Dan Mangan
CNBC

Excerpt: The U.S. Department of Education said Wednesday that Columbia University has failed to meet the standards for accreditation because the Ivy League school “is in violation of federal antidiscrimination laws” for allegedly tolerating harassment of Jewish students on campus.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights notified the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, an accrediting institution that Columbia belongs to, of the alleged violation. The department noted that by federal regulations, “accreditors are required to notify any member institution about a federal noncompliance finding and establish a plan to come into compliance.”

Jonah Valdez
The Intercept

Excerpt: In March, a group of scholars filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration to block the government from detaining and deporting students and professors for speaking out about Palestine. 

Now, as the case heads to trial in Massachusetts federal court in July, those professors and students worry they may be targeted by immigration officials for speaking out in the courtroom on the witness stand. 

Jake Offenhartz
Associated Press

Excerpt: New York University said it would deny a diploma to a student who used a graduation speech to condemn Israel’s attacks on Palestinians and what he described as U.S. “complicity in this genocide.”

Logan Rozos’s speech Wednesday for graduating students of NYU’s Gallatin School sparked waves of condemnation from pro-Israel groups, who demanded the university take aggressive disciplinary action against him.

Nicole Barbaro Simovski, Ph.D.
Free the Inquiry, Heterodox Academy, Substack

Excerpt: Diversity statements started to be commonly required for applications for university faculty positions starting in the 2010s. These statements—often one- to two-page essays detailing a candidate's commitment to advancing diversity, enquiry, and inclusion goals in their academic work—have been a fierce topic of debate. On the extremes, one side sees diversity statements as simply asking faculty candidates to demonstrate how they advance the university’s values. The other side sees them as thinly veiled ideological filters in hiring.

After a decade, following intense controversy over the use of these statements in hiring, the UC system has officially put an end to the practice.

Nicole Barbaro Simovski, Ph.D.
Free the Inquiry

Excerpt: Diversity statements started to be commonly required for applications for university faculty positions starting in the 2010s. These statements—often one- to two-page essays detailing a candidate's commitment to advancing diversity, enquiry, and inclusion goals in their academic work—have been a fierce topic of debate. On the extremes, one side sees diversity statements as simply asking faculty candidates to demonstrate how they advance the university’s values. The other side sees them as thinly veiled ideological filters in hiring.

Kyle Cheney
Politico

Excerpt: A federal judge blocked President Donald Trump’s bid to deprive federal funding from programs that incorporate “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives.

U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson ruled that Trump’s policy likely violates the First Amendment because it penalizes private organizations based on their viewpoints. And the judge said the policy is written so vaguely that it chills the free speech of federal contractors concerned they will be punished if they don’t eliminate programs meant to encourage a diverse workforce.

Katherine Knott
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: A federal district judge in Kentucky tossed out President Biden’s overhaul of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, ruling Thursday that the regulations exceeded the department’s statutory authority and violated the U.S. Constitution.

The Education Department is now unable to enforce the new regulations, which took effect last summer following a lengthy process to rewrite a rule put in place by the first Trump administration. The decision was part of a lawsuit brought by Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.

Nicholas Confessore and Steve Friess
New York Times

Excerpt: The University of Michigan will no longer require diversity statements as part of faculty hiring, promotion and tenure decisions, the school announced on Thursday, marking a major shift at one of the country’s leading public research institutions.

The new policy, issued by Michigan’s provost, comes as the university’s regents weigh a broader overhaul of its sprawling diversity, equity and inclusion programs, among the most ambitious and well financed in the country.

Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: When a group of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched a pro-Palestine magazine in the spring of 2024, they hoped it would serve as a platform for “revolutionary thought on campus,” according to its first issue: “We believe that writing and art are among the most powerful tools for conducting a revolution.” Housing artwork, literature and essays related to Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, the publication, titled Written Revolution, began as a totally independent magazine before becoming an official student organization this fall.

The publication has ceased nearly all distribution in response to administrators’ demands, according to students affiliated with the organization, and Iyengar is facing disciplinary action.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: North Carolina’s four-year public universities have eliminated 59 positions and “realigned” about 130 more since the University of North Carolina Board of Governors repealed the system’s DEI policy, according to a newly released summary from the UNC system.

In May, the board voted 22 to 2 to repeal and replace its policy with one that doesn’t mention race. The board required universities to report on their efforts to comply by the start of last week, and the UNC System released the results from this “equality certification” Wednesday.

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.

Chris Linder

Inside Higher Ed

I was a victim advocate on a college campus for seven years. Since 2011, I have worked as a faculty member whose research, teaching and activism focuses on addressing sexual violence among college students. And for the past five years, I’ve led the development of a center for violence prevention on a campus where three women were murdered by domestic or dating partners in one year, followed by an additional alleged domestic violence homicide four years later.

Few things make me more ashamed or angry than the way the federal government attempts to intervene in sexual misconduct on college campuses. Politicians use survivors and transgender students as pawns in a political power struggle.

Wherefore art thou, Romeo? South Carolina’s new, one-size-fits-all library regulations will restrict access to the classics
John Coleman
FIRE

Excerpt: Yesterday, the South Carolina State Board of Education imposed new regulations requiring the removal of all books that include any description of “sexual conduct” from every public school library in the state. This means that classic literary works like “Romeo and Juliet,” “The Canterbury Tales,” and “Ulysses” could be taken off the shelves, raising First Amendment concerns.

Blanket bans like this one in South Carolina impose one-size-fits-all, top-down mandates that require school district administrators to review library books without analyzing whether the specific content is suitable for specific age groups and grade levels.

Nadine Strossen
Persuasion

Excerpt: The current Supreme Court term includes a cluster of cases that could well shape the future of online free speech. These cases invite the Court to determine the power of both government officials and social media platforms concerning “content moderation” policies, which in turn define platform users’ speech rights.

Given the unparalleled importance of these platforms for all manner of communication—personal, professional, and political—meaningful free speech rights depend on the platforms’ policies. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Court’s rulings over the next weeks may well determine the shape of speech online for years to come.

Megan McArdle
Washington Post

Excerpt: After a decade of ever-escalating commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion, elite campuses are reversing course. It's amazing to watch such an abrupt volte-face. What’s even more amazing is how far things went beforehand and how long the correction took to arrive.

Such double-think regimes are vulnerable to what economist Timur Kuran calls a “preference cascade in reverse”: As people realize their neighbors share their skepticism, they start voicing their true opinions, an effect that dominoes until the whole regime collapses.

Emma H. Haidar and Cam E. Kettles
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: After months of grappling with a campus fractured by a polarizing debate over the Israel-Hamas war, Harvard announced on Tuesday that the University and its leadership will refrain from taking official positions on controversial public policy issues.

The University’s new stance followed a report produced from a faculty-led “Institutional Voice” working group, which advised leadership to not “issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.” Interim Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 wrote in an email that he accepted the working group’s recommendations, which were also endorsed by the Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body.

Abigail Shrier
The Free Press

Excerpt: A police officer who pulls over speeding black motorists—and only black motorists—isn’t protecting “law and order.” He’s engaging in invidious discrimination. So too the university administrators who suddenly discover they are free speech absolutists only when student protesters call for the death of their Jewish classmates.

Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic

Excerpt: This month, Professor Randall L. Kennedy, an eminent scholar of race and civil rights, published an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson denouncing the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in academic hiring. “I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice,” he wrote. “The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince.” But a “contrasting perspective” on diversity statements that the Crimson published argued that “furor over diversity statements in hiring is a red herring.”

But people who see the flaws of the status quo should not be seduced by the illusion that tweaking how DEI statements are solicited or scored is a solution. In fact, interviewing Hall, the ostensible reformer in the Harvard Crimson debate, left me more convinced that abolishing DEI statements is the best way forward.

The Editorial Board
Cornell Daily Sun

Excerpt: College students are losing sight of why democracy matters. At Cornell, where censorship is becoming the norm, it’s no wonder why. When people get robbed of opportunities to participate peacefully in what the late civil rights leader John Lewis called “good trouble, necessary trouble,” that disillusionment quickly alchemizes into rage and disdain.

That’s what makes the University’s Interim Expressive Activity Policy so backward, depraved and ultimately dangerous — it fans those flames of resentment. On Jan. 24, the administration unilaterally implemented a set of draconian guidelines to redefine what acceptable protest on campus looks like.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The Modern Language Association’s Delegate Assembly passed an “emergency motion” Saturday defending college and university employees and students who are facing threats, harassment and violence for criticizing Israel’s violence against Palestinians.

The weekend-long MLA Annual Convention included multiple panels that discussed the war in Gaza. A Friday open hearing ahead of the Delegate Assembly featured heated debate on the motion that ultimately passed, along with a different one that would’ve broadly supported “academic freedom and free expression” without mentioning either Palestine or Israel.

Eugene Volokh
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason

Excerpt: This question has been in the news recently, in light of the recent House Committee hearings on "Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism." A few thoughts on my part:

[1.] There's no "advocacy of genocide" exception to the First Amendment, or to the contractual promises of student free speech that many private universities rightly implement.

[2.] Indeed, as I've argued before, it is important that students be free to debate what is proper to do in war, and what wars are just. War involves mass killing, in some wars by the millions. I think some such killing is atrocity and some is just. But different people draw the lines differently, and that is a matter that is quite rightly up for debate.

Matt Hamilton
Los Angeles Times

Excerpt: Until recently, USC professor John Strauss was known mostly for his research on the economics of developing countries, with decades of fieldwork in Indonesia and China. That changed Nov. 9, when Strauss stopped before students staging a walkout and protest calling for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and holding a memorial to thousands of Palestinian civilians killed in the Israel-Hamas war.

The economics professor’s interactions with students that day ended with the 72-year-old Strauss, who is Jewish, declaring: “Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one should be killed, and I hope they all are killed.” Within a day, an associate dean told Strauss that he was on paid administrative leave, barred from campus, and that he would no longer teach his undergraduates this semester.

Dan McLaughlin
National Review

Excerpt: One case that isn’t quite ready to be considered Tuesday, but could intrigue the justices, is Speech First, Inc. v. Sands (No. 23-156), which challenges campus speech codes. The case comes from a divided panel decision of the Fourth Circuit, which rejected challenges to two Virginia Tech campus speech policies.

Virginia Tech has backed off the policy since the suit was filed. FIRE also notes that “time and time again, [it] has seen universities revise unconstitutional policies, only to bring them back when there is employee or state government turnover.” Given the widespread use of such policies and the open circuit split on their legality, it would seem a fit time for the Court to get involved.

Joe Killian
NC Newsline

Excerpt: The UNC System has issued directives to its 17 campuses on how to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision on the role of race in admissions. Over five pages, it lays out specific policies for universities and warns against actions and policies not explicitly prohibited by the Supreme Court decision, due to “the high cost of litigation” for those who might sue.

As NC Newsline has reported, legal scholars and critics of the decision have warned threats of lawsuits by conservative activists may intimidate universities into going beyond what is required by the ruling. The UNC System’s directives appear to substantiate those fears.

Lori Rozsa
Washington Post

Excerpt: The Florida State Board of Education approved new rules Wednesday for how Black history will be taught in public schools that critics are decrying as a “step backward.”

The updated standards say students should learn that enslaved people “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit,” and that in teaching about mob violence against Black residents instructors should note “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

By Jeremy Bauer-Wolf
Higher Ed Dive

Excerpt: The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday ruled against race-based admissions practices at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shattering decades of legal precedent and upending the recruitment and enrollment landscape for years to come.

In fact, most colleges don’t rely on race as an admissions factor, as they accept a majority or all of their applicants. Thus, only a small swath of selective higher ed institutions will likely need to remold their admissions policies. But no matter what, when enrollment offices have accounted for race, it was not supposed to be the sole admissions criterion, which court precedent already established as illegal.