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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.

Emma Whitford
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The Trump administration last week asked a Pennsylvania court to compel the University of Pennsylvania to turn over the names and contact information of some Jewish employees and students. In recent days, students, faculty members, on-campus Jewish groups and others have rallied around Penn officials’ decision not to disclose the information.  

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.

Randall Kennedy
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: On a posting for a position as an assistant professor in international and comparative education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, applicants are required to submit a CV, a cover letter, a research statement, three letters of reference, three or more writing samples, and a statement of teaching philosophy that includes a description of their “orientation toward diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.”

At Harvard and elsewhere, hiring for academic jobs increasingly requires these so-called diversity statements, which Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning describes as being “about your commitment to furthering EDIB within the context of institutions of higher education.” By requiring academics to profess — and flaunt — faith in DEI, the proliferation of diversity statements poses a profound challenge to academic freedom.

Mary Whitfill Roeloffs
Forbes

Excerpt: The New York Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit in Manhattan on behalf of a pair of pro-Palestinian student groups that were suspended last fall after their protests pushing for a cease-fire in Gaza allegedly violated university policy—as tension over the Israel-Hamas war spills onto campuses and causes some donors to withdraw support of legacy schools.

Joanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: As protests raged on college campuses after the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October, Columbia University set out to codify clear-cut guidelines for on-campus demonstrations. But the announcement of the Student Group Event Policy and Procedure plan drew swift backlash for being overly restrictive; among other things, it required “special events”—including any gathering expected to draw “high attendance/capacity”—to be registered two weeks in advance.

Four months later, the university has released new guidelines, called the Interim University Policy for Safe Demonstrations. It was born in part out of concerns that the previous iteration had been established too “hastily,” said Dr. Jeanine D’Armiento, chair of Columbia’s University Senate executive committee and an associate professor of medicine in anesthesiology.

Ben Raab
Yale News

Excerpt: Timothy Snyder evacuated his “Hitler, Stalin, and Us” lecture on Thursday afternoon after a Communist activist group entered the classroom and would not leave.

Around 10 demonstrators affiliated with the Revolutionary Communist Party showed up at the classroom in William Harkness Hall five minutes after the start of class and began shouting at Snyder while holding up signs and recording students. “It seemed like they just wanted to shout Professor Snyder down, not engage in any sort of discussion,” William Wang ’26, a student in the class, told the News. “After a few minutes of shouting it was clear they weren’t gonna go away. Eventually, we just left and went to another classroom.”

Greg Lukianoff and Angel Eduardo
The Free Press, Substack

Excerpt: On our most elite college campuses—most recently, the University of California, Berkeley—the plan seems to be to unfound it. Earlier this week, a student group called Bears for Palestine published on Instagram its intention of “combatting lies” by shutting down an event featuring Israeli Defense Forces reservist and lawyer Ran Bar-Yoshafat.

The mob got their way. The event was canceled. Bar-Yoshafat, along with the students who had attended the event, were escorted out the back of the theater. Any students who took part in the violence should be expelled—assault is a crime and most certainly violates the school’s code of conduct. As for the students who organized the shutdown but did not participate in the violence, they should be punished.

Annabelle Tilsit
Washington Post

Excerpt: Harvard University is again embroiled in a controversy over antisemitism on campus, after student groups and a faculty group shared an antisemitic cartoon.

In a statement late Tuesday, Harvard interim president Alan M. Garber condemned the cartoon, calling it “flagrantly antisemitic,” after it was shared on social media by two student groups — the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and the African American Resistance Organization — and reposted by Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.

J. Brian Charles
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: At least 14 states this year will consider legislation that could dismantle the ways college administrators attempt to correct historical and structural gender and racial disparities and make campus climates more inclusive, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education analysis.

The Chronicle has identified at least 19 bills that will be considered in the coming months that seek to ban the employment and funding of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices; the use of pledges by faculty and staff to commit to creating a more inclusive environment on campus, commonly known as diversity statements; mandatory diversity training; and identity-based preferences for hiring and admissions.

Komi Frey
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: From 2016 to 2022, most University of California campuses participated in an experimental program, funded by the state Legislature, to use diversity, equity, and inclusion statements as the first cut in faculty-applicant pools. According to UC’s guidelines, the purpose of diversity statements is for applicants to explain what they have done and plan to do to serve underrepresented-minority people on campus — specifically, African Americans, American Indians, and Hispanics/Latinos.

By making political values the sole criterion at the initial hiring stage, UC-faculty searches strayed from the American Association of University Professors’ bedrock 1915 “Declaration of Principles,” which states that scholars have a duty to remain neutral and not act in the interests of any particular segment of the population.

Aaron Sibarium
The Free Press, Substack

Excerpt: In its own telling, Yale Law School’s Schell Center for International Human Rights seeks to “equip lawyers and other professionals with the knowledge and skills needed to advance the cause of international human rights.” The center has educated students and human rights professionals on atrocities large and small, issuing a detailed report last year on ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and proposing a framework in mid-September to moderate “indirect hate speech online”—whatever that means.

But six days after Hamas’ October 7 massacre over 1,400 Israelis and kidnapping of 240 more, the center was silent.

Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe
Reason Magazine
 
Excerpt: California Community Colleges' new teaching standards "mandate viewpoint conformity" and "compel professors to teach and preach the State's perspective," according to a lawsuit called Palsgaard v. Christian, filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE.  

Join Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe this Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern for a discussion with Jessie Appleby, an attorney with FIRE, and Bill Blanken, the plaintiff and a chemistry professor at Reedley College in California, who says the standards advanced by the state's community college board amount to "compelled speech" in the classroom.

Aaron Terr
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Vulgar. Lewd. Indecent. Hateful. Those are four types of speech the city of Arab, Alabama, bans from signs within its borders. But as FIRE explained in a letter to the city on Tuesday, they’re also four types of speech protected by the First Amendment.

By Joe Killian
NC Newsline

Excerpt: Should students at UNC System Schools and community colleges be required to take a course on history and government, irrespective of their majors? Should lawmakers be able to prescribe the curriculum for such a course, rather than campus leaders and faculty?

By Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley's Blog

Excerpt: After years of resisting demands under the Public Records Act (including alleged violations), UC Berkeley has finally turned over documents to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) on its hiring criteria. The files show that Berkeley has been grading faculty on their commitment to DEI, including viewpoints that should be protected by free speech or academic privileges.