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By Michael Camp
Princetonians for Free Speech

Excerpt: Recently members of the senior class at Princeton University were asked to respond to an opinion survey. Among the many questions asked, one was “How would you describe your political persuasions?” Another question asked, “On a scale from one to five, how comfortable do you feel sharing your political views on campus?” Of the total population of 1296 seniors 542 answered both of these questions.

By ABIGAIL ANTHONY for The National Review

 I arrived at Princeton University in September 2019. I had looked at Princeton online and thought, “one day . . .” 

Eyal Press
New Yorker

Excerpt: In 2005, a “working definition” of antisemitism was posted on the website of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, a research institute founded by the European Union. It described antisemitism, somewhat vaguely, as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.”
On July 23rd, Columbia reached a settlement with the Administration which required it to pay the government two hundred million dollars over the next three years and to broaden its “commitment to combating antisemitism,” in exchange for having hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants reinstated. Ten days earlier, Columbia had incorporated the I.H.R.A. definition of antisemitism into both its anti-discrimination policies and the work of its Office of Institutional Equity.

Michael C. Bender, Alan Blinder, Michael S. Schmidt
New York Times

Excerpt: Harvard University has signaled a willingness to meet the Trump administration’s demand to spend as much as $500 million to end its dispute with the White House as talks between the two sides intensify, four people familiar with the negotiations said.

According to one of the people, Harvard is reluctant to directly pay the federal government, but negotiators are still discussing the exact financial terms. The sum sought by the government, which recently accused Harvard of civil rights violations, is more than twice as much as the $200 million fine that Columbia University said it would pay when it settled antisemitism claims with the White House last week.

David French
New York Times

Excerpt: Like many of its conservative alumni, I have a complicated relationship with Harvard. I grew up in a small town in Kentucky, where I went to public school. I attended college at a small Christian university in Nashville. I never had a thought that I could attend Harvard Law School. But friends urged me to try. When I got in, it was so shocking that it felt miraculous. I knew it would change my life — and it did. It gave me some of my closest friends, it gave me career opportunities I couldn’t previously fathom, and it kindled in me a love for constitutional law. At the same time, the school had profound problems.

The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. In the 30 years since my graduation, the school has continued to change lives, and it has maintained one of the least tolerant cultures in American higher education.

Jerry A. Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: Bill Ackman is the billionaire hedge-fund manager who not only publicized the drop of donations to Harvard because of its purported antisemitism, but also helped bring down President Claudine Gay. But he’s also a double Harvard alum.

Apparently Ackman gave an invited talk about the Harvard Corporation, couched in financial jargon. There are 49 slides, and they pretty much encompass his thesis, which is that Harvard has become a business aimed not at providing a quality education to students, but to enriching the Corporation, and its mission has changed from promoting learning to pushing a “progressive” ideology.  In the process, it’s become woke and bloated with administrators.  But Ackman does seem some glimmers of hope on the horizon.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Law professor Katherine Franke has long been outspoken in her support of Palestinians. Now, after House Republicans and her university president called her out in an antisemitism hearing, she faces potential termination.

Sebastian B. Connolly and Julia A. Karabolli
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: Tucked away at the end of a corridor on the second floor of Harvard’s Divinity Hall, the offices of the Religion and Public Life program are usually quiet — a quietness that belies its position at the center of highly public controversy that, in just a few short years, has threatened to consume it entirely.

The program has been targeted in a lawsuit accusing Harvard of permitting antisemitism on campus and an early list of demands that the Trump administration considered imposing on Harvard. But RPL’s own faculty say that it is the critics of the program that are practicing intolerance as they seek to police pro-Palestine speech.

Kathryn Palmer
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Nearly six months after the Israel-Hamas war unleashed a steady tide of student-led protests on college campuses across the United States, Indiana’s public flagship university is emerging as a free speech battleground.

The latest dispute is over the abrupt cancellation of a long-planned art exhibition at Indiana University at Bloomington’s Eskenazi Museum of Art, Samia Halaby: Centers of Energy. Halaby is an internationally recognized Palestinian American abstract artist. Critics of the decision think there’s more to the story. And while they don’t know the specific factors driving the decision, they can’t ignore the pressure IU administrators have been under since Indiana congressman Jim Banks threatened to withhold federal funding from the university if they don’t adequately address perceived antisemitism on campus.

Jennifer Schuessler and Vimal Patel
New York Times

Excerpt: The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an increasingly prominent free-speech organization, has long been known as a fierce opponent of campus political correctness. Since its founding in 1999, it has been celebrated for defending conservatives and other dissidents from the prevailing liberal culture at America’s universities.

The group, long a scourge of university administrators, also finds itself working to help protect schools it has criticized in the past from new threats. When FIRE filed a brief in support of Harvard’s lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s cuts in research funds, the group noted its own record as “a leading critic of Harvard’s inconsistent and insufficient protection of free speech and academic freedom.”

Cathy Young
The Bulwark

Excerpt: Last week's right-wing freakout over the Cracker Barrel logo redesign—apparently amounting to white-guy erasure—had more than its share of sublimely ridiculous moments. But none, perhaps, were more emblematic of the current “anti-woke” crusade than the call to action from author, activist, and Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo.

Of course, what also makes it noteworthy is that Rufo isn’t just some random social-media blowhard. In recent months, he has emerged as the unofficial ideologue of the Trumpian assault on the liberal cultural establishment.

Tom Nichols
The Atlantic

Excerpt: Seven years ago, Pauline Shanks Kaurin left a good job as a tenured professor at a university, uprooted her family, and moved across the country to teach military ethics at the Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island. She did so, she told me, not only to help educate American military officers, but with a promise from the institution that she would have “the academic freedom to do my job.” 

But now she’s leaving her position and the institution because orders from President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, she said, have made staying both morally and practically untenable. 

Robert Pondiscio
American Enterprise Institute 

Excerpt: The conservative education watchdog group Defending Education has done important and often brave work exposing ideological overreach in K–12 schools. I’ve cited their reports and findings many times and consider them friends and compatriots, so I don’t say this lightly: they’ve badly misfired with their new report, Consultants in the Classroom: Making Big Money in K–12 Schools. So badly, in fact, that they should withdraw the report and issue a correction and apology.

Ryan Holiday
New York Times

Excerpt: For the past four years, I have been delivering a series of lectures on the virtues of Stoicism to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and I was supposed to continue this on April 14 to the entire sophomore class on the theme of wisdom.

Roughly an hour before my talk was to begin, I received a call: Would I refrain from any mention in my remarks of the recent removal of 381 supposedly controversial books from the Nimitz library on campus? My slides had been sent up the chain of command at the school, which was now, as it was explained to me, extremely worried about reprisals if my talk appeared to flout Executive Order 14151 (Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing). When I declined, my lecture — as well as a planned speech before the Navy football team, with which my books on Stoicism are popular — was canceled.

Abigail Anthony
National Review

Excerpt: Current Princeton undergraduate Alexandra Orbuch shared footage on social media of an event on campus that featured former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. Predictably, activists tried to prevent him from speaking.

Scott Alexander
Substack

Excerpt: In a recent post, I said that part of opposing cancel culture is to rigorously define it. Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, took up the challenge.

Tom Perkins and Will Craft
The Guardian

Excerpt: As antisemitism hearings on college campuses ignited late last year, US representatives Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx seized the spotlight, relentlessly attacking Harvard, Columbia and other top universities, portraying them as unsafe and incompetent.

A little-considered group of Stefanik and Foxx political allies and donors quietly benefited: the “for-profit” college industry.

Christopher Bao and Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The 13 members of the Princeton community arrested for occupying Clio Hall during pro-Palestine protests last semester had their first appearance in Princeton Municipal Court on Tuesday. All the arrestees are charged with defiant criminal trespassing, a petty offense in the state of New Jersey.

The University has indicated it will not interfere with the criminal proceedings. Municipal prosecutor Christopher Koutsouris, who is prosecuting the case, told The Daily Princetonian that the University handed him full control of the case, noting that he consulted with the University’s legal counsel on the matter.

Cole M. Crittenden
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: I am both a graduate alum of Princeton as well as an administrative staff member who worked in the Office of the Dean of the Graduate School for a decade. Although I am not a faculty member, I served for an extended period as the acting dean of the Graduate School during my time as a staff member there. It is from this unusual perspective that I write to convey my dismay at the actions taken by a group of protestors towards Graduate School staff in Clio Hall on Monday of this week.

Nonviolent and peaceful protests have a place on college campuses; such protests are an important exercise of freedom of speech and expression. However, when expression turns into mob activity that threatens and displaces staff who play no meaningful role in the matters of interest to the protestors, it crosses a line.

Christopher L. Eisgruber
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Confrontations at Columbia, Yale, and other campuses around the country have highlighted the importance of “time, place, and manner” regulations to universities’ academic and educational missions. Because the enforcement of these rules is essential to our community as well, I wanted to offer some observations about their role at Princeton and their relationship to other free speech principles.

Keith E. Whittington
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: The extraordinary outpouring of support on American university campuses for the events of October 7th has, unsurprisingly, led to some backlash from alumni, donors, and future employers. Big donors to elite institutions are realizing that something has gone terribly wrong on college campuses and have reconsidered their support. Big law firms have questioned whether students involved in such political activities would be acceptable employees.

Johanna Alonso and Kathryn Palmer
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: In an incident that many people viewed as a troubling escalation of tensions on a college campus over the Israel-Hamas war, pro-Palestinian students banged on locked library doors while shouting “Free Palestine” at Cooper Union in New York City while Jewish students were inside the library, according to a widely circulated video of the Oct. 25 incident.

Meghan Cox Gurdon
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: We’re in a terrible spot, and everybody knows it. Americans on the right and left detest each other, excoriate each other and, with every flaring of rage, move further from any sense of pluralistic common cause. Citizens have lost confidence in officialdom. Fashionable ideologies that brook no good-faith dissent have surged into every corner of life. Make a minor demurral, even a joke, and you risk being subjected to the ghastly nullification rituals of what is called cancel culture.

It is this predicament, all of it, that Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott address in “The Canceling of the American Mind,” a lucid and comprehensive look at where we are and how we got here, and, less persuasively, what we can do to make things better.

Ben Slivka
Minding the Campus

Excerpt: One year ago, I attended a pre-football game tailgate party on the Saturday of my 40th reunion weekend in Evanston, Illinois. Students at the party later complained about my words, and Northwestern University (NU) canceled me without speaking to me.

I escalated to the President, the General Counsel, the Chair, and the Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees. Despite my more than 7,000 volunteer hours and over seven million dollars in donations—NU has not apologized, has not rescinded my cancellation, and (I presume) continues to trample the free speech and due process rights of other Wildcats.

Graham Piro
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Earlier this month, Princeton professor Robert George’s appearance at Washington College provided yet another example of what’s known as the “heckler’s veto.” Protesters entered the event and drowned out George’s speech, eventually forcing him to leave — while security officers stood by and watched as the protesters shouted and played loud music to prevent George from speaking and those in attendance from hearing him. While the college publicly denounced the disruption, FIRE called on it to do more by educating its security officers on their responsibility to intervene and remove disruptive protesters.

In response to FIRE’s letter, Washington College President Michael J. Sosulski told us that part of the school’s post-incident analysis “will include ensuring that [its] Public Safety officers are prepared to engage in ways that will not permit events to be disrupted or abruptly canceled.”

PEN America Press Release

Excerpt: PEN America called on Daytona State College in Florida to reschedule a photo exhibition by Jon Henry in light of a dispute over why the show was cancelled. PEN America said the contentious development creates a “troubling precedent” and called on the college to offer to host the show in the future.

By The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: A Fourth Circuit majority [ruled] that Virginia Tech's bias response team does not have a chilling effect on free speech. The ruling, written by Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, a Clinton appointee, states: "[T]he First Amendment does not stand in the way of modest efforts to encourage civility on college campuses." Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee, wrote in dissent: "The stark reality of the record is that programs like the Bias Intervention and Response Team are being used in the service of discouraging that open inquiry from which education draws its very meaning and sustenance.”

Emma Whitford
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: In a letter to American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the education committee, accused American Association of University Professors president and AFT vice president Todd Wolfson of promoting “organizational antisemitism” within the AAUP. 

Cassidy cited an August Inside Higher Ed interview with Wolfson in which the union leader stood against sending weapons to Israel, accused the Trump administration of weaponizing antisemitism for political gains and advocated for the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, a definition of antisemitism that does not include anti-Zionism.

By Stuart Taylor, Jr., President of PFS

Since the University of Chicago paved the way in 1967 with its Kalven Committee Report, some 30 other American universities and colleges have followed suit by insisting on “institutional neutrality” on political and social issues, while alsoaffirming their commitment to the academic freedom of faculty and students in the face of suppression from internal and/or external entities.

Samuel A. Church and Cam N. Srivastava
The Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: Only one-third of Harvard’s last graduating class felt comfortable expressing their opinions about controversial topics during their time at the College, the University’s 2024 senior survey found, reporting a 13 percent decrease from the Class of 2023.

Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced today it agrees with a federal court ruling that appropriately found the Biden-era Title IX rules to unconstitutionally restrict student First Amendment rights.  

Those rules, effective in August 2024, infringed on constitutionally protected speech related to sex and gender. They also rolled back crucial due process rights for those accused of sexual misconduct on campus, increasing the likelihood that colleges would arrive at unreliable conclusions during those proceedings.

Columbia Spectator
Rebecca Massel

Excerpt: Columbia temporarily suspended Business School assistant professor Shai Davidai’s campus access, University spokesperson Millie Wert confirmed in a statement to Spectator on Tuesday.

Davidai publicized the University’s decision to restrict him from campus in a video posted to his Instagram account on Tuesday evening. In the video, he said “the University has decided to not allow me to be on campus anymore. My job. Why? Because of Oct. 7. Because I was not afraid to stand up to the hateful mob. And because I was not afraid to expose Mr. fucking Cas Holloway.”

Academic Freedom Alliance

The Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA) today sent a letter to Columbia University regarding its investigation into a professor for criticizing the political statements of certain students and student groups on social media. On February 8, 2024, Columbia’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action informed Professor Shai Davidai that it had begun the investigation based on complaints that he “harassed” members of the community, asserting that his “public commentary since October 2023 . . . is perceived to be anti-Palestinian/Arab.”

Susan Svrluga
Washington Post

Excerpt:  Students returned to Harvard’s campus last month after a turbulent and polarized start to the academic year, one punctuated by protests, a disastrous congressional hearing and the resignation of the university’s first Black president. The school has been sharply divided over the Israel-Gaza war; diversity, equity and inclusion efforts; and the limits of free expression. It has been attacked by politicians, wealthy alumni and its own students, a rare sign of vulnerability for one of the country’s most powerful and influential academic institutions.

Jessica Wills
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Excerpt: Faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania are concerned that free expression and viewpoint diversity may disappear completely from their university.  After a tense congressional hearing in which then-President Liz Magill said the university would not punish many forms of constitutionally protected speech — including anti-Semitic speech — Magill backtracked the next day via a video apology in which she signaled her willingness to abandon constitutional standards for free speech. Shortly afterward, she resigned.

In the wake of this shakeup, the future of free speech at Penn is far from certain. Others, however, would like to see the school revive its commitment to free speech. In that spirit, some faculty members drafted a “New Constitution for the University of Pennsylvania,” a vision for the university which calls Penn to recommit itself to intellectual diversity, institutional neutrality, and open discourse.

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley’s Blog

Excerpt: Universities and colleges across the country have become embroiled in a debate over free speech in the aftermath of the massacre of Israelis by Hamas terrorists this week. Various student groups have expressed support for Hamas or their cause while condemning Israel. Black Lives Matter (BLM) chapters have even shown the image below of one of the terrorists who paraglided into Israel where hundreds of civilians were murdered, including babies.

Harvard has been a particular flashpoint over strident statements of condemnation of Israel immediately after the attack. The support has led to at least one firm rescinding an offer to a pro-Palestinian NYU law student as well as calls for universities to cut off support for student groups condemning Israel.

Bridget O'Neill
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 responded to criticism of the inclusion of a controversial book on a course syllabus on Wednesday after Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) sent a public letter urging the book be removed. Eisgruber defended academic freedom and made the case that it could coexist with a welcoming environment for students.

Gottheimer is the latest public figure to criticize the book, titled “The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability” which is on the syllabus for NES 301: The Healing Humanities — Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South taught by Professor Satyel Larson.

Darius Gross
Princeton Tory

Excerpt: In recent weeks, controversy has arisen surrounding an upcoming course in Princeton’s Near Eastern Studies (NES) Department for its inclusion of a book on its sample reading list that claims the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) deliberately cripples Palestinians.

While free speech protections are vital to the University and the book’s removal should not be the first response in a case like this, that does not mean anything goes. A piece of work that has sparked academic scandal must be thoughtfully studied in that context. If Prof. Larson refuses to acknowledge the plethora of scholarship critical of Puar’s book and its unfounded allegations, then she will have strayed from the University’s truth-seeking purpose, and removal of the work as Steinlauf has urged may prove necessary.