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Emma Whitford 
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: As of last week, faculty at Ohio State University can no longer make land acknowledgments—verbal or written statements that recognize the Indigenous people who originally lived on the university’s land—unless it is directly relevant to class subject matter.

The new policy from the university’s Office of University Compliance and Integrity is one of many created in response to Ohio’s SB 1, a sweeping higher education law passed in March that seeks to eliminate DEI offices and scrub all mentions of diversity, equity and inclusion from university scholarships, job descriptions and more. 

Robert Shibley
FIRE

Excerpt: Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services accused Harvard of violating Title VI, which bans discrimination based on race or nationality at any school that takes federal funding. Last week, it was reported that Harvard is nearing a $500 million settlement with the administration to end legal battles.

In the past two years alone, HHS noted, Harvard has accepted nearly $800 million from the government. But the threat to Harvard’s funding is just the headline. The sweeping theory of “harassment” HHS used to justify its claim has the potential to cause huge damage, not just at Harvard but across the nation, by collapsing protected speech and misconduct into a single charge that could turn campus protest into a civil rights violation.

Erin Shaw
Free The Inquiry, Heterodox Academy, Substack 

Excerpt: Although requests for DEI statements in faculty hiring may be well-intentioned, they can actually undermine open inquiry by setting up ideological filters that exclude those who don’t share – or are unwilling to pretend they share – specific political opinions and worldviews.

But how common is the practice of asking for DEI statements in faculty hiring, and what patterns exist among such requests? At the top level, we found that 22.3%, or over one out of every five, of the 10,000 faculty job advertisements analyzed requested some kind of DEI-related material as a part of the application process. In other words, about one out of every five faculty members hired within the last year probably had to espouse a particular set of political views to have a chance of landing the jobs they sought.

Vilda Westh Blanc
City Journal 

Excerpt: Higher education accreditation is in crisis. Accreditation was once an important signal, giving parents and students useful information about the value of a college degree. Now it has been reduced to a political weapon wielded against those who deviate from progressive orthodoxy.

This year, six public university flagships—Texas A&M and the Universities of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee—joined forces to create the Commission for Public Higher Education. CPHE focuses on a different model of accreditation. By focusing on real student achievement, job readiness, and research productivity, these universities aim to make accreditation a tool for competitive enhancement, not a bureaucratic straitjacket.

Erin Shaw
Heterodox Academy

Excerpt: A win for open inquiry has appeared amidst relentless uncertainty in higher education. The Western Association of Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC), the accreditor of most universities in California and Hawaii, is reconsidering the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) requirements for accreditation in light of the Trump Administration’s executive order on accreditation.

Though the total banning of all things “DEI” represents another political intrusion on academic freedom, dropping DEI as an accreditation requirement allows more space for freedom of thought in higher education as institutions are no longer bound to a particular partisan orthodoxy.

Nolan L. Cabrera 
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: This is a call to my dear faculty friends and colleagues in higher education institutions. In the first months of the new presidential administration, and indeed since the election, many have been searching for answers. I have been in more meetings, gatherings and brain dump sessions than I can count, all focused on the same existential question: What does this all mean?

I am not calling for us to be lacking in strategy or unaware of our contexts. However, I am extremely concerned that a number of my fellow academics are engaging in pre-emptive self-censorship.

Jaweed Kaleem
LA Times

Excerpt: After the Trump administration told schools to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs or face federal funding cuts, USC has deleted the website for its university wide Office of Inclusion and Diversity and merged it into another operation, scrubbed several college and department-level DEI statements, renamed faculty positions and, in one case, removed online references to a scholarship for Black and Indigenous students.

The University of Southern California’s actions — similar to some other universities throughout the country — appear to be aimed at avoiding federal scrutiny, according to USC faculty and staff and reviews of portions of the USC website archives.

Robby Soave
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Newly inaugurated President Donald Trump signed a bevy of executive orders earlier this week, including one that seeks to end the federal government's pressure campaign on social media companies.

The "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship" executive order reaffirms the free speech rights of social media users and prohibits government agents from engaging in unconstitutional censorship.

Abigail Anthony
National Review

Excerpt: In early September, Harvard University announced changes to its “doxing” policies, stating that “doxing occurs . . . when a community member publicly shares an individual’s personal information without their permission with the intention and effect of intense harassment.” Unfortunately, the new guidelines provide yet another avenue to censor speech on campus by establishing a framework for a hypersensitive student to punish a university member who publicly stated what that student had done.

Jacob Wendler, Lily Ogburn, William Tong, and Jerry Wu
Daily Northwestern

Excerpt: For the first time since student protests erupted on campus calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and University divestment from Israel during Spring Quarter, Northwestern President Michael Schill sat down with The Daily for a wide-ranging interview. He reflected on his handling of April’s encampment on Deering Meadow and discussed the University’s path forward.

Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack

Excerpt: For the fifth consecutive year, FIRE has delivered its annual College Free Speech Rankings. This year, we paired the largest survey of college student attitudes on free expression ever conducted (almost 59,000 students surveyed!) with the most comprehensive databases ever collected of deplatforming attempts, professor cancellation attempts, student cancellation attempts (full database forthcoming, but the incidents used in the rankings calculation are on our website), and speech codes ever collected.  

The full report is well worth reading. But to prime you for it, here are five key takeaways that show how colleges have moved around, explore why that might be, and highlight what students need to work on most.

The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Another day, another Biden Administration regulation, and another loss in federal court. This time it’s the Education Department’s 1,577-page rule on Title IX, the law that prohibits sex discrimination. The Supreme Court on Friday upheld lower judges who stayed the regulation and, despite quibbles by four Justices, all nine seem to believe the rule is an overreach.

Rexton Laird
FIRE

Excerpt: Ahead of what could be another tumultuous year for free expression on college campuses, forthcoming FIRE/College Pulse survey data shows just a fraction of undergrads have a solid understanding of their own campus’s protest policies.

Conducted near the end of the Israeli-Palestinian campus protests, between May 17 and June 25, 2024, the survey sampled 3,803 undergraduates at 30 four-year colleges and universities in the U.S. Asked how aware they are of their college’s written speech policies on campus protest, almost half of students surveyed said they are either “not aware at all” (19%) or “not very aware” (29%). Only 19% of students — less than a fifth — responded they are “extremely” (6%) or “very”(13%) aware of the relevant policies.

Katherine Knott

Inside Higher Ed

A federal district judge on Tuesday blocked the Biden administration from enforcing its new regulations for Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 in Alaska, Kansas, Utah and Wyoming.

Judge John Broomes of the District of Kansas wrote in a 47-page opinion that the Education Department lacked the authority to expand prohibited sex-based discrimination under Title IX to include discrimination based on gender identity and that the new regulations could chill speech “through vague and overbroad language.” The protections for LGBTQ+ students are at the heart of the Kansas lawsuit and other legal challenges.

Katherine Knott
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The Biden administration’s new rule overhauling Title IX, the federal gender-equity law, is on hold in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia after a federal judge issued an order temporarily blocking the regulations from taking effect in those states Aug. 1.

Chief Judge Danny Reeves of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, found that the final regulations, which clarify that Title IX prohibits discrimination based on sexual and gender identity, are inconsistent with the underlying Title IX statute, Congress’s intentions in passing the law, and the way it’s been regulated.

Liam Knox
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will not renew the contract of a professor whose classes they recorded without his permission, university media relations director Beth Lutz confirmed.

Larry Chavis has taught economics at the university’s Kenan-Flagler Business School on a yearly contract since 2006. In April, he was notified that his classes had been secretly recorded by a camera in his lecture hall, and that footage of those lessons had been used in a professional review. The review was prompted by “reports concerning class content and conduct … over the past few months,” associate dean Christian Lundblad wrote in a letter to Chavis.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: A recent announcement from The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) tells us something we knew was coming: the Biden Administration is walking back the improvements in Title IX made by Betsy DeVos. (Yes, it was one of the few good things done under Trump.) The original rules, which bear on how colleges adjudicate sexual misconduct, were put in place by Obama, then rolled back and made more fair by DeVos, and now Biden’s reverting the law to the Obama standards, which are palpably unfair because they take away rights from the accused that are in place in real courts.

Alexandra Alter
The New York Times

Excerpt: After several years of rising book bans, censorship efforts continued to surge last year, reaching the highest levels ever recorded by the American Library Association. Last year, 4,240 individual titles were targeted for removal from libraries, up from 2,571 titles in 2022, according to a report released Thursday by the association.

Those figures likely fail to capture the full scale of book removals, as many go unreported. The American Library Association, which has tracked book bans for more than 20 years, compiles data from book challenges that library professionals reported to the group and information gathered from news reports.

George Will
Washington Post

Excerpt: Although the Supreme Court is frequently accused of improper “activism,” it is often guilty of passive dereliction of duty. It was last week, when it refused to correct the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit’s lackadaisical tolerance of the culture of enforced conformity on campuses.

Last week, the supposedly activist Supreme Court passively refused to hear Speech First’s appeal against the 4th Circuit’s passivity. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., vigorously dissented, saying that Virginia Tech’s regulating of speech “appears limitless in scope”: “From the moment a student enters the university until graduation, he is under the university’s surveillance.” On campus and off.

Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder
Banished, Substack

Excerpt: On January 25, 2024, American University banned all indoor protests in the name of “inclusivity.” AU’s Office of the President explained this and other policy changes in a remarkable open letter that reads like a parody of what we call DEI, Inc. The first paragraph alone invokes “belonging” three times and “community” four times.

AU’s maneuver here--deploying the language of inclusion to clamp down on free speech--is one that we’ve seen many colleges and universities make in response to campus controversies surrounding the Israel-Hamas war. It’s a worrying trend: If students can’t protest, colleges and universities will fail to achieve one of their core missions, which is to prepare students for citizenship.

Jennifer Kabbany
College Fix

Excerpt: A higher education watchdog group has filed a complaint with the organization that accredits Harvard University over campus leaders’ probe into plagiarism accusations against former President Claudine Gay.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni filed a 12-page complaint with the New England Commission of Higher Education that calls on the group to launch a probe into “Harvard’s apparent violation of its own established procedures in the investigation of the alleged plagiarism committed by Dr. Gay,” ACTA stated in a Jan. 12 news release.

Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Inbar is an eminent, influential, and highly cited researcher with a Ph.D. in social psychology from Cornell University. There is no question that he is qualified. Anyone worth their salt doing work on political polarization knows Inbar's name. Inbar also jumped through all the hoops UCLA put up for the job, including submitting a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement, which is currently all the rage in colleges and universities. He even shares the politics of the majority of the psychology department.

But on his podcast, Inbar had expressed relatively mild concerns over the ideological pressures that DEI statements impose and wondered aloud whether they do harm to diversity of thought. As a result of this petition—signed by only 66 students—UCLA did not hire Inbar. And he's not the only academic this has happened to. Far from it.

James Kirchick
New York Times

Excerpt: The tentative, lawyerly answers given last week by three university presidents at a House committee hearing investigating the state of antisemitism on America’s college campuses have generated widespread revulsion across the partisan divide. When none of the presidents — representing Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania — could muster a straightforward reply to the question from Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, about whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” amounted to “bullying or harassment,” many prominent Democrats joined Republicans in denouncing the testimony.

But two wrongs don’t make a right. If the problem with campus speech codes is the selectivity with which universities penalize various forms of bigotry, the solution is not to expand the university’s power to punish expression. It’s to abolish speech codes entirely.

Eric Kelderman
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Delegates to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges may vote on Tuesday to require the examination of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts as a condition of accreditation, according to Belle Wheelan, the group’s president.

If that vote is successful, it could set up a clash with state politicians who describe DEI efforts as violating legal bans on racial preferences and a way to enforce liberal groupthink on college campuses.

Michael Arria
Mondoweiss

Excerpt: Columbia University says its suspending two campus Palestine groups.

In a statement posted on the school’s website Senior Executive Vice President of the University and Chair of the Special Committee on Campus Safety Gerald Rosberg said the university is suspending Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) for the remainder of the fall term. The event that Rosberg referenced was a peaceful walkout and subsequent art installation. It was carried out as a part of a national call to action in response to the Israeli attacks on Gaza. So far over 10,000 Palestinians have been killed.

Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: The government cannot force public colleges to derecognize Students for Justice in Palestine chapters. That's just what State University System of Florida Chancellor Ray Rodrigues, reportedly at the direction of Gov. Ron DeSantis, is trying to do.

There’s no indication from the chancellor’s letter that any action from Florida’s Students for Justice in Palestine groups went beyond expression fully protected by the First Amendment. This directive is a dangerous — and unconstitutional — threat to free speech. If it goes unchallenged, no one’s political beliefs will be safe from government suppression.

Elazar Cramer and Yonah Berenson
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip killed, raped, kidnapped, and wounded thousands of innocent civilians in Israel’s Southern District on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. They took over one hundred and fifty civilians hostage, including American citizens, and they have threatened to begin executing them.

It brings us only distress to detail these horrific events, but we must because too few on this campus have expressed the repugnance that these murders must prompt.

Ariana Figueroa
NC Newsline

Excerpt: One of Thomasina Brown’s favorite books is a memoir about a girl who deals with the grief of losing her father and struggles with her sexual identity. Brown, a 16-year-old student at Nixa High School in Nixa, Missouri, said in an interview that she felt a connection with the book, as she grieved the loss of her own father and came to terms with her own queer identity.

That book, “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” is one of the more than 3,300 books that have been banned during the 2022-2023 school year, a 33% increase from the previous school year, according to a report by PEN America, a group that is dedicated to fighting book bans and advocates for the First Amendment.

KC Johnson
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: The Biden administration intends, in October, to release new Title IX regulations to deal with campus sexual assault and harassment. In their proposed form, the regulations strip from accused students virtually all of the procedural protections they currently have under Title IX, unless a local court ruling requires their college or university to employ a fairer process.

To understand why we are waiting for yet another set of Title IX regulations, it’s important to understand the history of the last 12 years.

Kathryn Palmer
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Law schools may soon be required to adopt written free speech policies under a proposal being considered by the American Bar Association.

The potential changes come after, but are not a direct consequence of, multiple high-profile incidents of student disruptions of speakers at law schools prompted widespread debates about free speech, academic freedom and students’ right to protest.

Laura Beltz
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Kiosks and bulletin boards, where students share everything from band tryout notices to political statements, are a classic part of a college campus. Even in the age of social media, posting materials where fellow students will likely see them, on the way to class or their dorm, is a critical avenue for expression.

But the University of South Dakota put a roadblock smack-dab in the middle of that avenue with its heavy-handed Poster and Advertising Policy.

By Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic

Excerpt: John D. Haltigan sued the University of California at Santa Cruz in May. He wants to work there as a professor of psychology. But he alleges that its hiring practices violate the First Amendment by imposing an ideological litmus test on prospective hires: To be considered, an applicant must submit a statement detailing their contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

By Adrienne Lu
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: A former psychology professor this week sued the University of California system, claiming that its use of diversity statements in hiring represents “a thinly veiled attempt to ensure dogmatic conformity throughout the university system.”

By Hannah Natanson
The Washington Post

Excerpt: Books about LGBTQ people are fast becoming the main target of a historic wave of school book challenges — and a large percentage of the complaints come from a minuscule number of hyperactive adults, a first-of-its-kind Washington Post analysis found.

By Joe Dodson
Courthouse News Service

Excerpt: A Fourth Circuit majority agreed Wednesday with a district court's determination that Virginia Tech's bias response team does not have a chilling effect on free speech.

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.

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.

Eric Kelderman
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: The accrediting group that oversees about 170 colleges in California and Hawaii is considering cutting the words “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion” from the standards that its member colleges must meet.

The WASC Senior College and University Commission is considering the changes as conservative lawmakers at both the state and federal level consider ways to curb the authority of accreditors and eliminate any consideration of DEI on college campuses.

Bridget O’Neill and Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The Council of the Princeton University Committee (CPUC) met on Monday, Nov. 11, for its second meeting of the academic year. The University's endowment came under particular scrutiny, as the group discussed divestment from Israel and fossil fuel dissociation. The state of dialogue among students in the wake of the US presidential election marked another of the meeting’s major talking points.

Sophia Wotman and Sam Levine
The Brown Daily Herald

Excerpt: The University temporarily suspended Brown’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine pending an external investigation into conduct violations at a pro-divestment protest held earlier this month.

“Given the severity of alleged threatening, intimidating and harassing actions during an event on campus, Brown University has initiated a review of the event and required the Brown chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine to cease all organization activities pending full review of the matter,” University Spokesperson Brian Clark told The Herald.

Emma Camp
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: The University of Maryland is now facing a lawsuit after unilaterally canceling all student expressive activities planned for October 7. The move came after the university received "numerous calls" expressing outrage over events organized by campus pro-Palestine groups to mark the anniversary of Hamas' massacre of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians last year.

Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Last spring, many of the students protesting the war between Israel and Hamas demanded that their universities divest from weapons manufacturers and other companies profiting off the bloodshed in Gaza. Some called for total divestment from Israel, accusing college leaders of being complicit in a genocide as the death toll of Palestinian civilians continued to climb.

Multiple universities agreed to weigh the divestment demands—among other concessions—often in exchange for students dismantling encampments. So far, few have actually moved to divest; some boards are still weighing the option while others have voted against it. But a handful of institutions have vowed to disclose their holdings, and some, such as San Francisco State University, have agreed to re-evaluate their investment screening processes.

Katherine Knott and Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The Biden administration’s new Title IX regulations, which strengthen protections for LGBTQ+ students and change how colleges respond to reports of sexual harassment, take effect today nationwide. Kind of.

So far, federal judges have issued six injunctions temporarily blocking the Education Department from enforcing the new Title IX rule in 26 states and hundreds of colleges in other states in response to lawsuits challenging the protections for LGBTQ+—and especially transgender—students. The first injunction was handed down June 14 and the most recent one issued July 31. The drip, drip, drip of court orders over the last seven weeks is part of what’s become an incredibly contentious fight over Title IX that’s left college officials fearful, frustrated and unsure about what comes next.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling against race-based college admissions (which involved Harvard), and the likely illegality of hiring faculty based on race, colleges are beginning to ratchet back on DEI-based admissions and hiring. (Although nobody’s yet taken a college to court for requiring DEI statements, I’m betting that such statements would be banned for constituting compelled speech.)

Now that MIT banned DEI statements for faculty job applications, the other great school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard, has just followed suit. According to the two articles below, Harvard has banned diversity statements.

Christopher Bao, Elisabeth Stewart, and Annie Rupertus
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Following a rushed special meeting on Sunday, April 28, the Undergraduate Student Government (USG) Senate published a statement around 2 p.m. on Monday, April 29 calling on the University to “publicly reaffirm the right to speak and peaceably assemble” and “commit to suspending neither student groups nor individuals without meaningful due process.”

USG President Avi Attar ’25 called the special meeting for 5 p.m. on Sunday, and nearly 100 attendees were present. This follows deliberation over two drafted statements — one composed by U-Council Chair Daniel Shaw ’25 and U-Councilor Isabella Shutt ’24, and the other by Senator Samuel Kligman ’26.