Search

Jay Bhattacharya & Wesley J. Smith

RealClearPolitics

The New England Journal of Medicine recently published an advocacy article that attacks academic freedom and urges stifling contentious campus debates. Specifically, Evan Mullen, Eric J. Topol, and Abraham Verghese urge universities to “speak out publicly” and issue official institutional opinions about public controversies involving its professors “when it concludes that a faculty member’s opinion could cause public harm.”

Julia Steinberg
Free Press, Substack

Excerpt: The Stanford Internet Observatory—a research center tasked with rooting out “misinformation” on social media—is shutting its doors. Chances are if you’ve heard of the SIO it was in a scathing piece from Michael Shellenberger or Matt Taibbi, who have accused the center of being a key node in the censorship-industrial complex.

In actuality, SIO hired a load of interns to scan social media for posts deemed to be mis- and disinformation.

Nathan Honeycutt
FIRE

Excerpt: Confidence in higher education has plummeted to its lowest level ever according to the results of two new national polls commissioned by FIRE and conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.

Per the polls, American confidence in higher education has plummeted over the past year, reaching record lows after months of campus protests over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Congressional hearings about anti-Semitism on college campuses.

John Engler and Jeffrey O. Nelson
Wall Street Journal
 
Excerpt: Justice Samuel Alito this month warned that freedom of speech on campuses and in many corridors of American society is imperiled.

Chaos is crippling America’s universities, which are now hubs of protest rather than learning. Anti-Israel encampments on some campuses have become beachheads for violence where reasoned debate and expression once flourished.

Elisabeth Stewart
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Following a petition by six faculty members in late April, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 has called a special meeting of the faculty for 4:30 p.m. on Monday, May 20.

The proposal — drafted by Molly Greene GS ’93, Ruha Benjamin, Dan-El Padilla Peralta ’06, Lidal Dror, V. Mitch McEwen, and Curtis Deutsch — asks the faculty to consider “the granting of amnesty to students and other university affiliates involved in peaceful free speech and assembly for justice in Palestine,” including the encampment, sit-in, and hunger strike. As of the hunger strike's ninth day, thirteen of the original participants have broken their strike, replaced by seven new strikers. The meeting agenda will include only one proposal regarding student discipline and free speech.

Derek Thompson
The Atlantic

Excerpt: Last month, the Pomona College economist Gary N. Smith calculated that the number of tenured and tenure-track professors at his school declined from 1990 to 2022, while the number of administrators nearly sextupled in that period. “Happily, there is a simple solution,” Smith wrote in a droll Washington Post column. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift, his modest proposal called to get rid of all faculty and students at Pomona so that the college could fulfill its destiny as an institution run by and for nonteaching bureaucrats.

The world has more pressing issues than overstaffing at America’s colleges. But it’s nonetheless a real problem that could be a factor in rising college costs.

Letter Reposted by Stanford Alumni for Free Speech and Critical Thinking

Excerpt: A copy of a letter sent by Stanford President Richard Saller and Provost Jenny Martinez to students who have been admitted as freshmen for this coming fall has now been made available publicly.

We believe this is a very powerful statement about free speech, critical thinking and what should be expected in an academic community, not just at Stanford but nationwide. We urge readers to take a look and even consider forwarding it to other interested parties.

Greg Lukianoff
UnHerd

Excerpt: Last week, Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin tried to give a talk about democracy at the University of Maryland. I say “tried”, because he never got to actually do it. Moments after Raskin began his remarks, pro-Palestine protesters started heckling him, shouting accusations that he was “complicit in genocide” and preventing him from proceeding with his speech.

2023 was the worst year ever for campus deplatforming attempts — and 2024 is already on track to blow it out of the water. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has already recorded 45 deplatforming attempts as of 15 March, a pace of around 200 for the year, but I suspect that it will be even higher as shout-downs have become such a popular tactic among activists.

Paula Chakravartty and Vasuki Nesiah
New York Times

Excerpt: At New York University, the spring semester began with a poetry reading. Students and faculty gathered in the atrium of Bobst Library. At that time, about twenty-six thousand Palestinians had already been killed in Israel’s horrific war on Gaza; the reading was a collective act of bearing witness.

Soon after those lines were recited, the university administration shut the reading down. Afterward, we learned that students and faculty members were called into disciplinary meetings for participating in this apparently “disruptive” act; written warnings were issued.

Abigail Chachkes and Thor N. Reimann
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: Concerns about campus speech are taking Harvard by storm. Given the “worst score ever,” by college free speech watchdog FIRE, Harvard’s administration has put together initiative after initiative to bolster open dialogue on campus.

While most of the dialogue around free speech on college campuses focuses on classroom culture and student groups in more overtly political protest spaces, the comedy scene has flown under the radar — despite the fact that comedy is often a means of self-expression amid times of social and political unrest.

Theo Baker
The Atlantic

Excerpt: Israel is 7,500 miles away from Stanford’s campus, where I am a sophomore. But the Hamas invasion and the Israeli counterinvasion have fractured my university, a place typically less focused on geopolitics than on venture-capital funding for the latest dorm-based tech start-up. Few students would call for Biden’s head—I think—but many of the same young people who say they want peace in Gaza don’t seem to realize that they are in fact advocating for violence.

The extremism and anti-Semitism at Ivy League universities on the East Coast have attracted so much media and congressional attention that two Ivy presidents have lost their jobs. But few people seem to have noticed the culture war that has taken over our California campus.

Erin Gretzinger
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: The newsletter seemed innocuous. In January, the chief diversity officer at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine kicked off her “Monthly Diversity Digest” with a list of nearby events for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Then Sherita Hill Golden outlined a “diversity word of the month”: privilege. “Privilege is a set of unearned benefits given to people who are in a specific social group,” Golden wrote. “Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural and institutional levels, and it provides advantages and favors to members of dominant groups at the expense of members of other groups.” Administrators and faculty members have been parroting similar definitions for years. This time, however, it struck a nerve online.

Greg Lukianoff and Sean Stevens
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack

Excerpt: Last week, we shared the alarming data coming out of FIRE’s new Campus Deplatforming Database to show just how bad the effects of violent protests and heckler’s vetoes on campus free speech really are. This week, we’ll address the skepticism about the “campus free speech crisis” dating back to 2018.

The crux of the “new dynamic” hypothesis is this: Do we have data supporting the claim that a significant portion of college students have become more hostile toward free speech than previous generations? According to FIRE’s new Campus Deplatforming Database (last updated Feb. 29, 2024), the answer is yes.

Pamela Paul
New York Times

Excerpt: The same week that a U.C. Berkeley protest ended in violence, with doors broken, people allegedly injured, a guest lecture organized by Jewish students canceled and attendees evacuated by the police through an underground passageway, a group of academics gathered across the bay at Stanford to discuss restoring inclusive civil discourse on campus. The underlying question: In today’s heated political environment, is that even possible?

Over the course of two packed days of moderated and free discussion, we would try to test it out.

Editorial Board
Case Western Reserve Observer

Excerpt: When it comes to the First Amendment, many people tend to forget that it was not meant to protect you from public scrutiny—it is meant to protect you from tyrannical governments. And currently, the United States’ government is acting less and less concerned about adhering to this amendment’s core tenets.

Jeff Amy
Washington Post

Excerpt: A proposal that would require school libraries to notify parents of every book their child checks out was advanced by Georgia senators Tuesday, while a proposal to subject school librarians to criminal charges for distributing material containing obscenity waits in the wings.

The measures are part of a broad and continuing push by Republicans in many states to root out what they see as inappropriate material from schools and libraries, saying books and electronic materials are corrupting children.

Ken White
Popehat Report

Excerpt:  University students are not the greatest threat to American liberty. That sounds obvious, but you might not know if you listened to popular discourse about universities. Universities, we’re told, are hotbeds of ruthless woke kulturkampf, indoctrinating students into far-left ideology and giving them an unslakable thirst for censorship that will be unleashed on America upon their graduation.

I dissent for several reasons. First, and most importantly, the greatest threat to American freedom of speech comes from our elected leaders. Second, a substantial part of the tumult about university students is right-wing kayfabe. The hostility towards students is often hostility against a set of values most popular with students — views about ethnic diversity, gender, and sexuality.

Mark Pulliam
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Excerpt:  To its credit, the American Bar Association, responsible for accrediting the nation’s law schools for purposes of eligibility for federal student loans and graduates’ bar admission, is considering a proposal (sponsored by the ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar) that would require law schools to adopt policies protecting the free-speech rights of faculty, staff, and students. It would also prohibit disruptive conduct interfering with free expression (such as the “heckler’s veto”) and provide for due process for those accused of violating the policy.

The ABA’s accreditation rules carry great weight, because law schools that do not comply face the loss of their accreditation—in effect, capital punishment. Law schools cannot ignore the ABA when accreditation is at stake, and the ABA knows it.

Collin Binkley
Associated Press

Excerpt: Generations of Americans have held firm to a version of free speech that makes room for even the vilest of views. It’s girded by a belief that the good ideas rise above the bad, that no one should be punished for voicing an idea — except in rare cases where the idea could lead directly to illegal action.

Today, that idea faces competition more forceful and vehement than it has seen for a century. On college campuses, a newer version of free speech is emerging as young generations redraw the line where expression crosses into harm.

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.

Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The Florida Board of Governors voted on Nov. 9 to remove the Principles of Sociology from the list of core courses that the state’s public college students can take to fulfill their general education requirements. The news shocked sociology professors across the state, who say the ripple effects of such a decision could be disastrous.

Students often rely on the course to satisfy the social sciences general education requirement. Indeed, many sociology departments consider it their bread and butter; at some of Florida’s largest institutions, the course can easily draw more than 100 students per section. It’s also the class where many sociology students first learn about the discipline.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: A professor is suing the Mayo Clinic medical school after a department chair threatened to fire him following a CNN interview in which he criticized the National Institutes of Health for not backing a COVID-19 treatment and a New York Times interview in which he said testosterone improves athletic performance.

Dr. Michael J. Joyner, an anesthesiology professor, filed the lawsuit Monday in a Minnesota state court in Olmsted County against the Mayo Clinic, Mayo’s College of Medicine and Science, Dr. Gianrico Farrugia and Dr. Carlos B. Mantilla.

Freddie DeBoer
Substack

Excerpt: There was an essay version of this, but honestly I don’t think any essay writing is necessary - the systematic silencing of Palestinian and Palestine-supporting voices is happening, no one is even pretending that it’s not happening, and it’s a direct threat to the basic principles of free expression that are supposed to apply to everyone and every topic, no matter what.

Jonathan Sumption
Unherd

Excerpt: Freedom of expression is probably the most widely acknowledged human right in the world. Lip service is paid to it even in totalitarian states. Freedom of expression is not worth much in Russia or North Korea, but their constitutions guarantee it in very similar terms as the United Nations. And yet, it is today under greater threat than any other human right. This is happening even, perhaps especially, in liberal democracies. How are we to explain this paradox?

Jacob Mchangama
Persuasion

Excerpt: Open democracies should not retreat from the institutional and civic commitment to free expression, however ugly many of its current manifestations are. Freedom of expression serves its most important function at times of deep polarization, where the sense of righteous indignation tempts us to silence the viewpoints we hate with scant regard for the collateral damage to democracy, freedom, and tolerance that constitute the necessary precondition for social peace in diverse societies.

Roger Ream
National Review

Excerpt: Once a place for the open exchange of ideas and honest debate, many U.S. college campuses no longer tolerate dissenting views expressed by students and professors.

This phenomenon, which has allowed dogma and ideology to supplant the search for truth, has taken root in college lecture halls, student governments, and campus newspapers. The trend has major implications for American life, as today’s students become tomorrow’s leaders. Its effects may be most clearly felt in a profession historically associated with reporting the facts and promoting diversity of opinion: American journalism. If unchecked, it will have both short- and long-term repercussions not just for future journalists but for the American experiment as a whole.

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley's Blog

Excerpt: We have been following the gradual elimination of common terms deemed offensive or microaggressive. The latest is the word “picnic.” After the University of Nevada Las Vegas law school’s Environmental Law Society announced a picnic, it was renamed “Lunch by the Lake” due to “diversity and inclusion” concerns.

The ELS was able to avoid a second correction with a “Lunch in the Field” since “field” has also been found to be offensive at other schools. According to a memo, the law group informed members that the word “picnic” has “historical and offensive connotations,” and apologized for “any harm or discomfort” caused by its use. That is consistent with the view of  the University of Michigan’s IT department in finding that “Picnic” was an offensive word.

Max Blaisdell
Hyde Park Herald

Excerpt: Amid a wave of book bans around the country and a surge in white supremacist propaganda in Illinois, the University of Chicago is launching a new forum to promote free speech and encourage open debate.

The Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression will debut this week with a series of on-campus panels featuring a number of scholars, artists and political figures in conversation on a variety of controversial social and political topics. Taking place on Thursday, Oct. 5 and Friday, panels will include Chicago’s Amanda Williams, Cathy Cohen and David Axelrod.

Madison Ingram
Los Angeles Times

Excerpt: This year is on pace to set the record for the highest number of attempted book bans since the American Library Assn. began compiling data on library censorship more than 20 years ago. Last year, there were demands to censor more than 2,500 library books.

Librarians and other educators in those states are fighting to defend the public’s right to intellectual freedom, but libraries have always been on the front lines of the conflict between censorship and free speech in the U.S. since the first public libraries were established in the 19th century.

David Deming
Forked Lightning, Substack

Excerpt: A few weeks ago, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released their annual College Free Speech rankings. Harvard ranked 248th out of the 248 schools that were ranked. Not only did Harvard rank last, but FIRE singled us out for special scorn.

My first instinct – and maybe yours – was to think they cooked the books to generate a headline-worthy result. So, naturally, I burrowed into the survey methodology like the good social scientist that I am. My conclusion was that we have a serious problem with free expression on Harvard’s campus. It’s not quite six sigma bad, because the point values for speech sanctions are somewhat arbitrary and there are sample selection issues with the FIRE database (everything gets more attention when it happens at Harvard, and some of the cases they document weren’t speech issues at all). Still, the student survey results are deeply discouraging.

Adam Goldstein
Washington Examiner

Excerpt: There has always been illiberalism on campus — at least, that’s what critics looking to hand-wave away concerns about cancel culture in higher education claim. But the insight that illiberalism predates cancel culture is as useful as saying that fire predates gasoline: It is both correct and astonishingly naive.

At the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, we collect a great deal of data about the higher education system, and our findings should alarm everyone.

Audie Cornish
The Assignment With Audie Cornish Podcast

Excerpt: Between student protests, controversial speakers, and debates over “safe spaces,” complaints about free speech on campus are louder than ever. How do school leaders respond to these gripes? And how do they balance freedom of expression – and the idea that speech can be violence?

We have two college presidents from the front lines of this debate: Roslyn Clark Artis of Benedict College and Michael Roth of Wesleyan University. Both schools are part of the so-called “Campus Call for Free Expression.”

Hannah Natanson
Washington Post

Excerpt: The American Library Association is facing a partisan firefight unlike anything in its almost 150-year history. The once-uncontroversial organization, which says it is the world’s largest and oldest library association and which provides funding, training and tools to most of the country’s 123,000 libraries, has become entangled in the education culture wars — the raging debates over what and how to teach about race, sex and gender — culminating in Tuesday’s Senatorial name-check.

James Huffman
National Association of Scholars

Excerpt: Academics from across the political spectrum have appropriately objected to some recently proposed laws as threats to academic freedom and thereby to higher education’s historic mission—the discovery and dissemination of knowledge. The principle of academic freedom has long stood as the guarantor of the free and open inquiry requisite to the academic pursuit of truth and is widely understood to allow for no exceptions.

But adherence to the principle does not preclude all limits on faculty conduct. Academic freedom does not require colleges and universities to tolerate bad teaching or incompetence. Nor should it protect professorial conduct that undermines open inquiry and pursuit of truth.

Jay Bhattacharya
The Free Press

Excerpt: My parents had taught me that people here could criticize the government, even over matters of life and death, without worry that the government would censor or suppress us. But over the past three years, I have been robbed of that conviction. American government officials, working in concert with big tech companies, have attacked and suppressed my speech and that of my colleagues for criticizing official pandemic policies—criticism that has been proven prescient.

The headline is a good one: the federal government can no longer threaten social media companies with destruction if they don’t censor on behalf of the government.

William Melhado
Texas Tribune
 
Excerpt: The political climate in Texas is the leading contributor to professors' desire to leave the state, a new survey of more than 1,900 Texas faculty members found. More than a quarter of those professors said they planned to look for positions elsewhere in the country this year as a result of political interference and widespread dissatisfaction with the state of higher education in Texas.

Of the professors surveyed, 57% cited the state’s political climate as their top reason for wanting to leave Texas. The second and third most cited reasons for a desire to leave were anxieties about salary and concerns over academic freedom, respectively.

Jeremy Young
Time Magazine
 
Excerpt: “Public universities,” Christopher Rufo wrote on August 11 on X (formerly Twitter), “are not a ‘free marketplace of ideas.’”

This provocative statement doesn’t fully convey Rufo’s views on the subject; he’s noted elsewhere that universities should be an “environment of open, substantive debate.” But as a trustee at New College of Florida, Rufo has demonstrated the limits of his tolerance for ideas that differ from his own.

Editorial Board
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Excerpt: Incoming University of Pittsburgh chancellor Joan Gabel has set an encouraging tone early in her tenure by associating herself, and the university, with the Campus Call for Free Expression. The culture of fear and distrust that has come to dominate American political life can only be overcome by learning to speak one’s principles boldly and to listen to others generously.

That’s the vision of College Presidents for Civic Preparedness, a consortium Ms. Gabel has joined, alongside 14 other academic leaders from institutions such as Duke University, Cornell University and the University of Notre Dame.

John Wilson
Academe Blog

Excerpt: On August 14, the Cornell Free Speech Alliance (CFSA) issued a report, “Lifting The Fog: Restoring Academic Freedom & Free Expression At Cornell University,” that made policy recommendations for how Cornell can improve its climate for free speech. Keith Whittington at Reason called the report “a valuable agenda for faculty across the country.” Carl Neuss, the chair of the Cornell Free Speech Alliance board, declared that the “recommendations themselves sort of read like mom and apple pie—it’s hard to not agree with them,”

While it’s a thoughtful approach that includes some good ideas, the report also includes an alarming number of calls to suppress free expression. Sadly, it’s not all mom and apple pie.

Leon Sachs
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: We should think about campus speech debates the way my hometown political cartoonist, Joel Pett, suggested we think about climate change. Some years ago, Pett published a political cartoon satirizing climate change denial: a speaker onstage at a climate summit is explaining the many benefits of greener environmental policies. In the crowd, a defiant climate skeptic stands up and exclaims, “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?”

If we replace meteorology with the university, this cartoon captures today’s debates about campus speech climates. It also suggests a better way to think about them.

Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: A New College of Florida professor who was denied tenure by the Board of Trustees has filed a lawsuit—along with the United Faculty of Florida—against the board and the Florida Board of Governors, which oversees higher education in the state. The lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of a recent state law that limits arbitration, News Service of Florida reported.

Viera-Vargas, a professor of Caribbean/Latin American Studies and Music, appealed the tenure denial, but his appeal was reportedly shot down; Corcoran cited a state law passed earlier this year—SB 266—that limits arbitration of faculty grievances.

Maya Bodnick
Slow Boring, Substack

Excerpt: Every year, hundreds of thousands of students around the U.S. participate in competitive debate. Most start competing at a young age (early high school or even middle school), eager to learn about politics. At its best, the activity teaches students how to think critically about the government and the trade-offs that policymakers face. They are assigned to argue for different positions that they may not agree with and engage with their peers’ diverse perspectives.

Instead of expanding students’ worldviews, debate has increasingly narrowed to become a microcosm of critical theory. These critical theory arguments, known as kritiks, are usually wielded by the negation side to criticize the fundamental assumptions of their affirmation side opponents.

Caroline Downey
National Review

Excerpt: In a scathing Monday letter to the governing body of the Arizona university system, the former events manager at Arizona State University’s auditorium, who was fired after booking Dennis Prager and other right-wing speakers, accused the school of conniving to censor speech and punish employees who stood in its way.

Aleks Phillips
Newsweek

Excerpt: Just over two years after Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a new law that restricted what can be taught in classrooms about race, gender and bias, a lawsuit brought by public school educators seeks to challenge its constitutionality.

In a filing brought by the Tennessee Education Association, a teachers' organization, along with five educators from the state on Tuesday, they said the ban placed vague restrictions on what teachers were allowed to reference—in an apparent violation of the Fourteenth Amendment—and which made the threat of disciplinary action greater due to its subjectivity.

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley Blog

Excerpt: We have often discussed the embrace of censorship by the left and many Democratic politicians, including President Joe Biden. However, the most distressing aspect of this trend has been the support of many in the media. That erosion of support for free speech was on display this week in a tweet from a New York Times’ reporter. Sheryl Gay Stolberg said that this week’s effort by Democrats to censor Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “raised thorny questions” about whether misinformation is protected speech.

There are no “thorny questions” over the censorship of this speech, because misinformation is unquestionably protected under the First Amendment.

Matt Reed
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: I read with interest the report on a new study from North Dakota State University on students’ hypothetical willingness to report professors who say “offensive” things.  

As a longtime administrator, I can count the number of student complaints about professorial speech on one hand and have fingers left over. It hasn’t happened with anything close to the frequency that the article indicates.