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Andreas Bikfalvi MD PhD
Substack, Heterodox STEM

Excerpt: I define Ideology-Based Investigations (IBIs) as inquiries that are not grounded in a rigorous scientific theoretical framework, where hypotheses can be tested. Instead, they rely on philosophical or legal scholarship that presents a veneer of scientific credibility. When these investigations originate from the left, they are rooted in post-modern or critical theory scholarship. Conversely, when they come from the right, they are associated with a mythological interpretation of past and present history. The American philosopher Michael Huemer [1], has referred to these as “progressive myths” when propagated by the left, but we should also recognize the concept of “reactionary myths” for those promoted by the right.

Campus Reform

Excerpt: Hours after the Student Advisory Committee president of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics declared that the organization should no longer be nonpartisan, the director reaffirmed the institute’s commitment to remaining nonpartisan.

Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Republicans are primed to ratchet up their efforts to hold colleges accountable after securing a majority in the House and Senate.

With President-elect Donald Trump in the White House, the table is set for the GOP to make significant progress on a higher ed wish list that includes granting federal aid to nontraditional programs, increasing taxes on wealthy colleges, cracking down on campus antisemitism and busting the current model for accreditation, experts say.

Bill Hewitt
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: In her interview with Mother Jones, Ruha Benjamin, Princeton’s Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies and latest MacArthur Fellow, confirmed that the University is investigating her role in the April 29 Clio Hall protest. As someone who called upon the University to investigate faculty involvement in the Clio Hall takeover, I welcome this development.

Gregory Conti
City Journal

Excerpt: As the broad American consensus in favor of free speech erodes, we have seen a similar unsatisfactory form of disputation proliferate. Critics of “free speech absolutism,” as it is condescendingly dubbed—we don’t refer to “rule of law absolutists” or “separations of powers absolutists,” for example—highlight all manner of alleged deficiencies with the status quo and trace them to an alleged excess of free speech.

In this asymmetrical theoretical comparison, implicit in much of today’s fashionable attacks on free speech, the alternative is hardly laid out at all. Somehow, we are led to believe, falsehoods and hurtful talk will vanish without truths getting caught in the dragnet, and no one, it appears, will be left any the worse off.

Eileen Boris
Academe Blog

Excerpt: In yet another assault on academic freedom, civil liberties, and peaceful protest, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, associate professor of global studies at the University of California, Irvine, is facing three misdemeanor charges for her effort to protect students when an excessive force of armed riot police (from twenty-one different units) assaulted the UCI Palestine solidarity encampment on May 15, 2024.

For her compassion and concern, this prize-winning mentor and teacher received charges of “failure to disperse at the scene of a riot,” “resisting a peace officer with the threat of violence,” and “resisting arrest.” Others arrested are facing the first two charges but only Willoughby-Herard faces threatening an officer in the process, a clear discrimination.

Steven McGuire and Michael B. Poliakoff
Tablet Magazine

Excerpt: Censorship is ugly behavior, whether it comes from the right or the left. Fortunately, it is most often self-defeating, but it is a warning sign of deeper pathology. So we see in the matter of philosopher, filmmaker, and humanitarian Bernard-Henri Lévy’s new book, Israel Alone.

Siyeon Lee
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: There is a specter haunting Princeton’s campus — the specter of free speech. It’s a perennial topic that inserts itself into most social, cultural, and political events on campus, and one that’s been exhaustively reiterated as a core value of this University. Its loudest proponents often present it as a fully apolitical idea: a set of sacred rules all parties should uphold in all circumstances, regardless of ideological differences.

While conservatives often present “absolute free speech” as an apolitical neutral, its defense is often ideologically charged. The posing of free speech as a champion against “leftist dogmatism” not only detracts from the importance of truly effective free speech, but also rests on a fundamental contradiction: It relies on the perpetual existence of the leftist dogmatism it so despises.

Hannah Hutchins
Minding the Campus

Excerpt: As a medical practitioner applying for a faculty position at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Chan Medical School, it is no longer satisfactory to demonstrate a curriculum vitae of excellent merits in research and medical practice. One must also be actively involved in promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) to a level that penalizes individuals who do not meet the strict levels of DEI engagement.

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley's Blog

Excerpt: Below is my column in the New York Post on the prestigious award given to Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya last week and what it has to say about those who censored, blacklisted, and vilified him for the last four years. In celebrating his fight for “intellectual freedom,” the National Academy effectively condemned those who joined the mob against him as well as the many professors who stayed silent as he and others were targeted.

Hope Perry ’24
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: Princeton students and community members engaged in heated arguments with Francesca Albanese, an Italian human rights expert, during an event hosted by the School of Public and International Affairs on Tuesday.

Albanese was appointed to her position, United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in 2022. She has been criticized for attending a conference hosted by Hamas’ Council on International Relations in 2022 and was condemned by the United States, France, and Germany for a 2014 comment that resurfaced in 2022 in which she characterized the U.S. as “subjugated by the Jewish lobby,” playing into an antisemitic trope.

Nate Tenhundfeld
Free the Inquiry, Heterodox Academy, Substack

Excerpt: Our friends over at FIRE keep a running list of incidents in which scholars have been targeted for something they have said or done. Helpfully, not only do they catalog cases by year and university but also by who initiates the targeting and what ideological direction they are coming from (relative to the position or issue at hand).

But do these targeting mobs always look the same? Are threats from the left mirrored in frequency by threats from the right? One thing that becomes immediately apparent looking at the data is that the ideological motivation for targeting of scholars on college campuses does not originate from just one side of the political aisle.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/20/opinion/hamas-colleges-free-speech.html?unlocked_article_code=1.T04.MQMi.lC3J1RNGPlWu&smid=url-share

Flora Champy, Stephen Macedo, Leora Batnitzky, Jonathan Mummolo, Sanjeev Kulkarni, Eve Krakowski, and Emmanuel Bourbouhakis
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The freedom of each Princeton faculty member to speak candidly on all manner of issues is indispensable. If faculty cannot express a broad range of intellectual views, including controversial ones, then the University’s mission to further human knowledge and educate students to become discerning, thoughtful citizens cannot be fully realized.

That is why we are supporting a proposal to modify the Rules & Procedures of the Faculty at Princeton to limit faculty meeting votes to matters directly concerning University governance. By extension, this measure would preclude votes that force faculty to take stances on political issues that lie outside of the faculty’s jurisdiction. We urge all our colleagues to vote in favor of this measure at the upcoming faculty meeting on Oct. 21.

Vitus Larrieu and Isabella Dail
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: At the height of pro-Palestine protests last spring, hundreds of people surrounded Clio Hall as 13 protesters occupied an office inside, ending with the arrest of all 13 inside the building.

During Tuesday’s hearing, McCarthy questioned protester Sara Ryave ’24 under oath regarding what happened inside Clio Hall from the protesters’ perspective. Over the course of about 15 minutes, Ryave confirmed previously reported information while divulging new information under oath. Here are the highlights.

By Marisa Warman Hirschfield ‘27

“Universities should follow the First Amendment, period. That’s it. That’s the framework.”

Legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein shared this message with over a hundred people in McCosh 50 during his “Free Speech On Campus” lecture. The James Madison Program hosted Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, on September 17th in celebration of Constitution Day. Attendees received a free copy of Sunstein’s 2023 book How to Interpret the Constitution upon entering. Adults comprised most of the audience with some undergraduate students scattered throughout the lecture hall. I attended in my capacity as a ’24-’25 Writing Fellow for Princetonians for Free Speech, an alumni group that offers many opportunities for student involvement.

Campus Reform
Patrick McDonald

Excerpt: Princeton University, Yale University, and Duke University have each been threatened with lawsuits for allegedly not complying with recent Supreme Court precedent banning race-based affirmative action in college admissions.

Jerry A. Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: Well, Princeton, via its president Christopher Eisgruber, has wussed out of adopting a crucial plank in a university free-speech platform: institutional neutrality. The man simply can’t hold back his ideological or political opinions, even if they chill the speech of faculty and students.

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley’s Blog

Excerpt: In the 1930s, Bertolt Brecht asked “What if they gave a war and nobody came?”  As someone who has been a teacher for over 30 years, I find myself increasingly asking the same question as trust and enrollments fall in higher education. There has been a precipitous decline in enrollments across the country as universities worry about covering their costs without raising already high tuition rates. From 2010 to 2021, enrollments fell from roughly 18.1 million students to about 15.4 million.

There is also an increasing view of higher education as an academic echo chamber for far left agendas. For many, there is little appeal in going to campuses where you are expected to self-censor and professors reject your values as part of their lesson plans.

Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: After years of promising it would find a way to punish professor Amy Wax for her controversial views on race and gender, Penn delivered today — despite zero evidence Wax ever discriminated against her students.

Faculty nationwide may now pay a heavy price for Penn's willingness to undercut academic freedom for all to get at this one professor. After today, any university under pressure to censor a controversial faculty member need only follow Penn’s playbook.

Radhika Sainath
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: In July, Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Maryland applied to hold a vigil on Oct. 7. The university granted the application but, after receiving numerous complaints, made a threat assessment, found “no immediate or active threat,” then still canceled the event—and, in an extraordinary and unlawful move, banned all expressive events on campus that are not university-sponsored on that date.

Abigail Rabieh
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: As first-years lined up outside Richardson Auditorium to hear President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 and Vice President Rochelle Calhoun speak about the importance of maintaining open dialogue on campus, older students stood outside and handed them pieces of paper with QR codes that linked to a PDF of the “Princeton Disorientation Guide 2024.” This document explains that “protest theory” teaches us how to build moral authority in two ways: by “increasing the number of people and increasing the sacrifice of the participants.”

This short claim demonstrates well the extent of the wrongness and impropriety that self-proclaimed “leftists” associated with the Princeton Progressive Coalition bring not only to interactions with their peers, but with the University itself. After all, since when has morality been determined by crowd behavior? What ever happened to being right?

Sean Stevens
The Eternally Radical Idea

Excerpt: This past spring, FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings survey was in the field when the encampment protests began. This gives FIRE the ability to analyze how student attitudes about free speech changed in response to the encampment protests. FIRE also conducted a separate survey on the encampment protests at 30 of the 251 ranked schools during the months of May and June.

The data from these two surveys offer incredible insight into how students reacted to the encampment protests. Among other things, they reveal that administrators on many campuses across the country have lost the trust of their students when it comes to free speech on campus.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: North Carolina’s four-year public universities have eliminated 59 positions and “realigned” about 130 more since the University of North Carolina Board of Governors repealed the system’s DEI policy, according to a newly released summary from the UNC system.

In May, the board voted 22 to 2 to repeal and replace its policy with one that doesn’t mention race. The board required universities to report on their efforts to comply by the start of last week, and the UNC System released the results from this “equality certification” Wednesday.

Featured
By Princetonians for Free Speech
PFS original content

President Eisgruber and his administration appear to have made a very good start on the new academic year. They conducted a first-year orientation that sent all the right messages on free speech, academic freedom, respect for diverse viewpoints, and the need for the university and its departments to avoid taking institutional positions on controversial public issues. They did the same in a new website on free speech which provides clarity on the free speech rules and where students should go with questions and concerns.

Michele Exner
Law & Liberty

Excerpt: Higher education is an important part of our society, so the question then becomes, how do we work to restore trust in these institutions? How can we work to truly make them neutral learning grounds where students can come to discuss ideas without having to fear retribution for their political beliefs?

In You Can’t Teach That! The Battle Over University Classrooms, Keith Whittington, a professor and scholar who has spent decades writing on the cross-section of academic freedom and the US Constitution, provides a well-researched and resourced analysis of the current issues facing colleges and universities, specifically public institutions.

Emma Camp
Reason

Excerpt: A Tennessee 10-year-old was expelled from school for a full year after he pointed his finger in the shape of a gun and made mock "machine gun" noises, according to a ProPublica investigation.

The boy was expelled as part of a "zero tolerance" law in Tennessee that mandates any student who makes a threat of "mass violence" be expelled for at least one year. While the law, originally signed in 2023—following a shooting by a former student at a private school in Nashville—was recently amended to direct schools to expel students only for "valid" threats, the provisions of the law are still vague, and schools have considerable enforcement leeway.

Eugene Volokh
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason

Excerpt: Loggins sued Stanford for race and religious discrimination and related claims, on the theory that "Stanford would not have investigated his class sessions, suspended him, publicly announced its investigation and his suspension, or refused to extend his contract '[b]ut for the fact that [Dr. Loggins] [is] black, Muslim and spoke out against Israeli policies that violated the Geneva Convention[.]'" But the court concluded that Loggins hadn't alleged sufficient evidence that Stanford's treatment was motivated by his race or religion.

Rana Jaleel and Todd Wolfson
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Since its founding, in 1915, the American Association of University Professors has been the most prominent guardian of academic freedom for faculty members and students, defending that freedom against threats that range from political interference in higher education to the exploitation of contingent academic labor. Yet the former AAUP president Cary Nelson alleges that the AAUP has somehow destroyed its “hundred-year defense of academic freedom” with a single act: the adoption of its recent “Statement on Academic Boycotts.” Others, like Jeffrey Sachs, lament that they are “not quite certain what the policy means” and that, “even worse, the AAUP doesn’t seem to know either.” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has reiterated its opposition to academic boycotts as “a threat to academic freedom.”

Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The University of Texas system and its institutions are no longer permitted to “adopt positions based on political or social passions or pressures,” according to a new rule approved by the Board of Regents on Thursday, The Austin American-Statesman reported.

“Rooted in the Kalven Report from the University of Chicago, the policy reflects the principle that the institution’s role is not to take positions on political, social, or other matters unrelated to its operation but to uphold a community where students, faculty, and staff have the freedom to do so,” a system spokesperson told the American-Statesman.

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.

Talia Barnes
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: In an August 14 letter to the campus community, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik announced her resignation after serving in the role for just over 13 months. She referred to “a period of turmoil where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community” and “tension, division, and politicization” that has “disrupted our campus over the last year.”

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley's Blog

Excerpt: For years, many of us have been writing about the decline in viewpoint diversity and the rise of an academic orthodoxy in higher education. It is one of the focuses of my new book, The Indispensable Right. Despite the calls for greater tolerance, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) just elected a new president who has been criticized for being overtly hostile to conservative viewpoints and candidates.

Alyssa Lukpat
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: A federal judge ruled the University of California, Los Angeles, must ensure equal access to campus for Jewish students after some alleged in a lawsuit they were blocked by protesters at this spring’s pro-Palestinian encampments.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The chancellor of Florida’s state university system has launched a review of public university courses for “antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias” following controversy this summer over a textbook and quiz questions allegedly used at Florida International University.

Randy Fine, a Republican member of the Florida House, who is Jewish and who served alongside the chancellor and calls him a friend, said the statewide review “absolutely” came from an incident at Florida International University this summer. “When we learned that Florida universities were using a factually inaccurate, openly antisemitic textbook, we realized there was a problem that had to be addressed,” Fine told Inside Higher Ed Thursday.

Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack

Excerpt: I recently appeared on “Plain English with Derek Thompson” to discuss “The Coddling of the American Mind” and how what Tim Urban calls “social justice fundamentalism,” otherwise called “wokeness,” affects mental health. Readers will recall my May 21 ERI post with my FIRE colleague Andrea Lan where we delved into the data on this.

As I mentioned on X recently, the reactions to the episode have ranged from thoughtful and interesting to the unsurprising assertions of, “My side is happy because we're better people. Your side is miserable because you're terrible people,” and, “My side is miserable because we actually see the world accurately. Your side is happy because you're selfish monsters.”

Yascha Mounk
Yascha Mounk Substack

Excerpt: Plenty of arguments against free speech lack any credible pretense of sophistication. They simply jump from the undoubted fact that many people say dumb or disgusting things on the internet to the understandable, if wrong-headed, wish that anybody who says such things should be made to shut up. But those who argue for restrictions on free speech with an ounce of sophistication have increasingly begun to invoke an idea by a philosopher whose work they otherwise studiously ignore: Karl Popper and his “paradox of tolerance.”

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.

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley’s Blog

Excerpt: In my new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I write about a global anti-free speech movement that is now sweeping over the United States. While not the first, it is in my view the most dangerous movement in our history due to an unprecedented alliance of government, corporate, academic, and media forces. That fear was amplified this week with polling showing that years of attacking free speech as harmful has begun to change the views of citizens.

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.

Mark Bauerlein
City Journal

Excerpt: Conservatives who have witnessed higher-education reforms fail to stop the spread of political correctness have good reason to be dismayed. There is, however, a promising tactic available to them right now, at least in some states, that requires little manpower and no extra cost. All it takes is a determined governor plus a few individuals experienced in academic politics and practice. Consider Florida.

What happened next provided a lesson for the Right: a few conservatives and a strong governor can enact genuine reform—if they exploit the proper power center.

Megan Cameron and Isabella Dail
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Dean Amaney Jamal of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) spoke about campus protests and the war in Gaza on a podcast with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on July 18. Jamal was in conversation with her friend and former colleague Keren Yarhi-Milo, the current Dean of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA).

The pair, while expressing some wariness towards the protesters on their respective campuses, advocated for dialogue on campus's that looked to empathize with why students are protesting. Columbia University's “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” which started in April, led the way for similar protests across the country in the spring, including on Princeton’s campus. Demands from protesters included divestment from Israeli-backed institutions and companies.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: After several years of effort, graduate students getting paid for research or teaching at the University of Chicago joined a labor union.  Because they couldn’t form a union de novo but had to join an existing one, they became dues-paying members of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, Local 11o3.

But joining the union came with an unexpected downside: unions can take political and ideological positions, and as a member of one (qualified students are required to join and pay union dues), you implicitly sign on to those positions.  And you may not want to do that.  In the case at hand, the Union has taken pro-Palestinian positions, and some students, especially Jewish ones, don’t want to sign on to these positions. So a group called “Graduate Students for Academic Freedom” has sued the union, alleging that the union makes them engage in implicit endorsement of the union’s positions.

Nick Gillespie
Reason

Excerpt: Ted and Courtney Balaker are the team behind the new documentary The Coddling of the American Mind. Based on the 2018 best-selling book by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, the film follows a series of students as they navigate life on today's highly charged college campuses. I spoke with Courtney and Ted, who started his video career as one of the first hires at Reason TV, about the Gen Z mental health crisis, free speech, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs, the oppressor-victim worldview, and why they chose to host the film on the innovative platform Substack rather than a more traditional venue.

Peter Berkowitz
RealClear Politics

Excerpt: In “How Liberal College Campuses Benefit Conservative Students,” which appeared online in early July at The Atlantic, Lauren A. Wright, in the spirit of “A Boy Named Sue,” urges “right-wing commentators” to appreciate the benefits of a campus environment that ridicules, condemns, and excludes conservative views.

Wright’s contrarian contention that the politicization of higher education advantages conservatives while harming progressives puts the controversy over the nation’s campuses in an unexpected light. No doubt some conservative students do rise to the occasion. In the face of their professors’ and fellow students’ knee-jerk hostility to conservative opinions, some students who hold them will develop thick skins, acquire the ability to appreciate the other side’s arguments, and improve their skills in fending off denunciation and diatribe and setting forth their own views under pressure. But most students – at Princeton, according to Wright, “conservatives make up just 12 percent of undergraduates” – are imbued with the progressive orthodoxy promulgated by much K-12 education, public and private.

Maggie Hicks
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Under a new Indiana law, public colleges are required to provide students a venue to complain if they think a professor isn’t protecting their right to “intellectual diversity.” In Utah, the Board of Higher Education will now conduct a biannual review of public institutions to ensure they’re complying with that state’s new law. And public colleges in Texas must submit an annual report to the state Legislature outlining how they’ve complied with bans on diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.

Wherefore art thou, Romeo? South Carolina’s new, one-size-fits-all library regulations will restrict access to the classics
John Coleman
FIRE

Excerpt: Yesterday, the South Carolina State Board of Education imposed new regulations requiring the removal of all books that include any description of “sexual conduct” from every public school library in the state. This means that classic literary works like “Romeo and Juliet,” “The Canterbury Tales,” and “Ulysses” could be taken off the shelves, raising First Amendment concerns.

Blanket bans like this one in South Carolina impose one-size-fits-all, top-down mandates that require school district administrators to review library books without analyzing whether the specific content is suitable for specific age groups and grade levels.

Jeffrey Flier
The Atlantic

Excerpt: In a recent op-ed in The Harvard Crimson—“Faculty Speech Must Have Limits”—the university’s dean of social science, Lawrence Bobo, made an extraordinary set of claims that seriously threaten academic freedom, including the chilling idea that faculty members who dare to criticize the university should be punished.

Bobo is a senior administrator at Harvard, overseeing centers and departments including history, economics, sociology, and African and African American studies. When he writes about faculty free speech, those within and outside his division listen.