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Ben Sasse
The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (originally printed in The Atlantic).

Excerpt: In the spring of 1994, the top executives of the seven largest tobacco companies testified under oath before Congress that nicotine is not addictive. Nearly 30 years later, Americans remember their laughable claims, their callous indifference, their lawyerly inability to speak plainly, and the general sense that they did not regard themselves as part of a shared American community. Those pampered executives, behaving with such Olympian detachment, put the pejorative big in Big Tobacco.

Last week, something similar happened. Thirty years from now, Americans will likely recall a witness table of presidents—representing not top corporations in one single sector, but the nation’s most powerful educational institutions—refusing to speak plainly, defiantly rejecting any sense that they are part of a “we,” and exhibiting smug moralistic certainty even as they embraced bizarrely immoral positions about anti-Semitism and genocide.

Danielle Allen
Washington Post

Excerpt: Last week Congress put squarely on the table the question of whether the health of our democracy requires renovation of our colleges and universities. I believe the answer to that question is “Yes.”

Important and clarifying as that moment was, the opening statement of Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) gave the hearing a broader frame. Foxx questioned the health of universities generally and called attention to “a grave danger inherent in assenting to the race-based ideology of the radical left,” arguing that we are at “an inflection point” requiring a reshaping of “the future for all of academia.” The chairwoman’s theme was not antisemitism alone but whether the diversity, equity and inclusion efforts of college campuses have been a wrong turn for America’s intellectual culture.

Niall Ferguson
The Free Press

Excerpt: Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill ethical values has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich. A university degree, far from inoculating Germans against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it.

Richard Amesbury and Catherine O’Donnell
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Academics are losing the support of the public. We read it in newspapers, we see it in surveys, we feel it in our bones. There are many dimensions to this problem. One is the claim that colleges restrict speech and lack intellectual diversity.

Whether and by whom free speech is under threat on campuses are hotly debated questions. Less commonly examined, however, are the assumptions that free speech is a cardinal virtue of higher education, and that colleges should aspire to a diversity of opinions. Are these goals in their own right, as college administrators often seem to think, or means for achieving something else altogether?

David Brooks
New York Times

Excerpt: Over the past five weeks, Jewish students on America’s campuses have found themselves confronted with those who celebrate a terrorist operation that featured the mass murder and reportedly the rape of fellow Jews. They see images of people tearing down posters of kidnapped Jewish children.

Universities are supposed to be centers of inquiry and curiosity — places where people are tolerant of difference and learn about other points of view. Instead, too many have become brutalizing ideological war zones, so today the most hostile place to be an American Jew is not at some formerly restricted country club but on a college campus.

Nell Gluckman
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: When Indiana’s abortion ban took effect, in the fall of 2022, Tamara Kay, a tenured professor in the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, tweeted that she was prepared to help students get access to health care. She hung a sign on her office door with her personal email address and a similar message.

About a month later, The Irish Rover, a student publication that says its mission is to uphold Notre Dame’s Roman Catholic identity, published an article about Kay titled “Keough School Professor Offers Abortion Access to Students.” A subhead read: “Abortion assistance offered to students despite IN law, ND policy.” In the days before the Rover article appeared, a business-school professor texted a student reporter that “there needs to be a coordinated assault on the Tamara Kay issue.”

Bari Weiss
The Free Press

Since Hamas’s October 7 massacre, it has been hard to miss the explosion of antisemitic hate that has gripped college campuses across the country. At Cornell, a student posted a call “to follow [Jews] home and slit their throats,” and a professor said the terror attack “energized” and “exhilarated” him. At Harvard, a mob of students besieged an Israeli student, surrounding him as they bellowed “shame, shame, shame.” At dozens of other campuses, students gathered to celebrate Hamas. 

Nuria Martinez-Keel
NC Newsline

Excerpt: With the movie release of “Killers of the Flower Moon” only days away, questions still persist about Oklahoma schools’ ability to teach the historical events depicted in the film. The source of the uncertainty is House Bill 1775, a 2021 state law regulating classroom discussions on race and gender.

Tribal leaders have called on the state Legislature to repeal the law, citing widespread confusion and fear among educators who worry teaching unvarnished American and Indigenous history could put them at risk. Educators could lose their teaching license and schools face an accreditation penalty if found in violation of HB 1775.

Sara Weissman
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Five professors laid off by the County College of Morris in New Jersey two years ago may be poised to get their jobs back after a state hearing examiner recently issued a scathing ruling concluding that their layoffs were a retaliatory move related to their union activities.

Samuel J. Abrams
American Enterprise Institute

Excerpt: In a recent and heated discussion about how to address the progressive capture and toxic culture of fear and silence that has engulfed so many of our nation’s colleges and universities, I realized that almost everyone lost sight of how much progress has been made in just a few years.

It is not clear how Florida will play out or if the various institutes and schools being established around the nation will effectively turn the tide. But what is unquestionable is that in a relatively short period of time, the American polity has become aware that there is a problem with expression on college campuses and that states and various groups have mobilized around fixing this crisis.

Elwood Watson
Daily Freeman

Excerpt: Those of us who work in academia understand that academic freedom represents the cornerstone of successful colleges and universities. It epitomizes the right of freedom to teach, discuss, engage in research and freely publish your findings. It also means the ability to dictate one’s own teaching and scholarship agenda, the security of academic positions and shared governance to ensure independence.

Despite such facts, the mission of academic freedom is under severe attack from varied quarters, resulting in ominous and potentially dangerous threats for both students and professors.

Stephanie Lundquist Arora
Washington Examiner

Excerpt: Fairfax County’s school district updated its code of conduct this year to include a “required culturally responsive, learning intervention” for students with first-time “hate speech” infractions. In Fairfax County, hate speech is defined in the broadest sense possible to include “misgendering.”

Fairfax County Public Schools has a history of compelling speech, arguably violating the First Amendment. In the last year, the 12 Democrat-endorsed school board members have made “ misgendering ” and “deadnaming” offenses punishable with suspensions for students as young as 5. It has also implemented a bias incident reporting system , which restricts free speech and is being challenged in courts nationwide

Jenna A. Robinson
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Excerpt: Last week, UNC-Chapel Hill and UNC Charlotte won Heterodox Academy’s “Institutional Excellence Award” for having “done the most to advance or sustain open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement either on its own campus or nationally.”

UNC-Chapel Hill trustee Perrin Jones told the Martin Center, “The Carolina Community—our students, administrators, trustees, and faculty—is in agreement about the important role that freedom of thought, conscience, and speech play within both the university and our broader society.” Jones, who spearheaded trustee efforts on free expression and institutional neutrality, added, “UNC, as it has done before, is proud to lead the way in protecting, and advancing, these freedoms.”

Heterodox Academy Panel Discussion, Wednesday, September 27, 4pm ET

Excerpt: Many colleges and universities are taking, or re-stating, official positions and principles on issues of open inquiry and free expression on campus – sometimes in response to external pressure, or through influence from varying campus groups.

What does this trend tell us, if anything, about the direction of higher education? Are official statements just cheap lip service? Or is this a moment for faculty to organize on campus to create positive change – and if so, what might that look like?

Abigail Anthony
National Review

Excerpt: A Texas public school fired an eighth-grade English teacher who assigned the reading Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, a graphic version of Anne’s unforgettable diary. The adaptation is particularly contentious because it depicts passages in which Anne describes her genitalia, expresses curiosity about the female body, and talks about menstruation.

Perhaps most egregiously, it’s a simplification that dishonors the care that Anne devoted to her writing. The issue is not whether teenagers are prompted to engage with her explicit passages; it’s whether they’re prompted to engage with her writing at all.

Paul Musgrave
Systematic Hatreds, Substack
 
Excerpt: A pair of Stanford scholars committed an op-ed in The New York Times this weekend, arguing that we need to bring back civics education to save democracy. Specifically, they argue, the “intolerance of ideas” that is percolating in American society results from “the failure of higher education to provide students with the kind of shared intellectual framework that we call ‘civic education.’”

I realized just how breathtakingly reactionary the essay is. There was a golden age, and then the wicked neoliberals introduced the elective, and now people are unable to live in a diverse society. To fix our society, we need this one weird trick that will save us from our depredations. Simple as!

Sahar Tartak
Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism

Excerpt: Like many campus clubs, the Yale Free Press (YFP) is a decades-old college paper that has risen and fallen with the times. During the pandemic, the YFP nearly died. Last year, an ambitious editor-in-chief brought it back, but unfortunately felt it was necessary to use the pseudonym “Gentleman Jack.” He wasn’t alone—many writers also went by pseudonyms. Why? The Yale Free Press is right-of-center. Journalists are not immune to fear of retaliation for wrongthink, even at (especially at?) the university level.

This year I’m counting on the maturity of my fellow classmates; I’m betting that by putting my real name on the masthead, I can encourage others to own their opinions, and to treat those with differing opinions with kindness and respect.

Yascha Mounk and Greg Lukianoff
The Good Fight Podcast, Persuasion

Excerpt: In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Greg Lukianoff discuss the state of free speech culture on America’s campuses and in society more broadly; FIRE’s progress litigating against coercive legislation in Florida and elsewhere; and the need to foster cultural habits that uphold individual expression.

September-October 2023
Jonathan Shaw
Harvard Magazine

Excerpt: At Harvard, there are research areas that can’t be investigated, subjects that can’t be broached in public, and ideas that can’t be discussed in a classroom. So says a group of more than 120 Harvard faculty members, who have formed a Council on Academic Freedom to respond to perceived assaults on free inquiry and a climate of eroded trust that they say stifle dissent.

J. David Goodman
New York Times

Excerpt: Cheryl Hensley, a librarian in Houston, was excited for the start of school. A veteran of four decades in the city’s public school system, she had stocked her library at Lockhart Elementary, a mostly Black school, with $40,000 in new books, and won a statewide award for her work. Then, late last month, Ms. Hensley, 62, was told she was no longer needed: The school’s library would be one of dozens turned into multipurpose computer rooms and used, in part, for discipline.

Jeremy C. Young and Jeffrey Sachs
The Daily Beast

Excerpt: The legislative war on college and university free speech has sadly become a persistent feature of the policymaking process in statehouses across the country. Another round of state legislative sessions has come and gone and with it many new proposals that would impose extensive restrictions on what can be taught in higher education classrooms.

The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: The diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy has injected progressive politics into many corners of the private economy, but its role in medicine is especially pernicious. Now a lawsuit is challenging whether California can force doctors who teach continuing medical education courses to also teach racial politics.

Washington Examiner Editorial
Washington Examiner

Excerpt: The more documents that Big Tech companies are forced to cough up through litigation and oversight, the clearer it becomes that there was in fact a coordinated campaign between social media platforms and the government to suppress speech that is inconvenient for those in power.

This censorship runs counter to our nation’s founding principles. Congress and litigants should keep up the pressure on social media companies to reveal what they did, and safeguards need to be put in place to make sure this never happens again.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: State governments often pick willing researchers to testify in lawsuits, buttressing their arguments. Outside of litigation, governments also often share data with professors, helping the scholars conduct research and the governments solve problems.

But what happens when researchers who work with a government, outside the courtroom, also testify in a case against that government? In California, the state Department of Education tried to stop one’s testimony and prevent another’s.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Note: This is another perspective on ‘Porter v. Board of Trustees of North Carolina State University.’

Excerpt: A divided federal appeals court has ruled against a professor who alleged North Carolina State University retaliated against him for three instances of him speaking his mind.

By Steven Lee Myers and David McCabe
New York Times

Excerpt: A federal judge in Louisiana on Tuesday restricted the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms about broad swaths of content online, a ruling that could curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives about the coronavirus pandemic and other issues.

The order, which could have significant First Amendment implications, is a major development in a fierce legal fight over the boundaries and limits of speech online. It was a victory for Republicans who have often accused social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube of disproportionately taking down right-leaning content, sometimes in collaboration with government. Democrats say the platforms have failed to adequately police misinformation and hateful speech, leading to dangerous outcomes, including violence.

Judd Legum

By Mark Mutz, Richard Gunderman
Heterodox Academy

Excerpt: Most observers expect that later this year the U.S. Supreme Court will rule that race-conscious admissions programs at universities are unlawful. A ruling of this kind has the potential to clarify the tangled jurisprudence regarding affirmative action in higher education. It also has the potential to begin to reduce the concern and confusion about diversity besetting American institutions.

By American Association of University Professors

Excerpt: A new report concludes that the administration of Hamline University violated the academic freedom of Professor Erika López Prater after a student complained of having been offended by Professor López Prater’s presentation of two images of the Prophet Muhammad during an online session of her art history class in October 2022.

By Robert McCoy
The Daily Beast

Excerpt: This year, graduating CUNY Law student Fatima Mohammed was elected by her peers to speak at her school’s commencement ceremony. Taking the stage during the May 12 ceremony, at a school that enjoys a reputation for social justice, Mohammed used her platform to speak about her class’ experiences and a number of political issues.

By Benjamin Ogilvie
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: It’s been a great week for social-media engagement at the University of Chicago Law School. On June 14, the school posted on LinkedIn to share my recent contribution to the Journal’s Future View discussing the Bud Light and Target boycotts. That post received 36 ugly comments from 23 alumni and students, along with more than 500 likes and reactions. The school also received an open letter of denunciation from 22 law-student organizations.

By Eric Kaufmann
The Free Press

Excerpt: If you read The Free Press, you know that over the last decade, an illiberal ideology that goes by various names—Critical Race Theory; Critical Social Justice—has transformed key institutions of American life. It is remaking the law, Hollywood, medicine, higher education, psychology, and more.

The lists of “top colleges” have varied little in many years. They always include the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, etc. But that could change. Colleges of all types can differentiate themselves on the core values of free speech and academic freedom, and those that do will increasingly attract more and better students, faculty, and employment opportunities for their graduates.

However, most of these “prestige” schools have low ratings in the annual survey of students on free speech issues conducted by the Foundation for Rights and Expression (FIRE). Many have had recent embarrassments that rightfully tarnished their image on free speech. And many have atmospheres that smack of indoctrination and huge bureaucracies to enforce those atmospheres.

By Ian Hodgson, Tampa Bay Times