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Rose Horowitch 
The Atlantic

Excerpt: If the Trump administration’s goal was to sow chaos among America’s colleges, it has definitely succeeded. Last month, the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights sent a letter to universities explaining the agency’s view that, because of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down affirmative action, any consideration of race—not just in admissions, but in hiring, scholarships, support, “and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life”—is now illegal. 

The reaction from universities could best be described as “panicked bewilderment,” Peter Lake, a law professor at Stetson University, in Florida, told me.

John K. Wilson 
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: On Feb. 14, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued an extraordinary Dear Colleague letter ordering all colleges and schools, public and private, that receive federal funds to implement massive changes and repression of free speech within 14 days. As the letter repeatedly warned and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency posted, “Institutions which fail to comply may face a loss of federal funding.”

The Feb. 14 letter is a full-fledged attack on affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion. It is also one of the worst attacks on academic freedom by the government in the history of American higher education.

Ian Bogost
The Atlantic

Excerpt: Jennie Bromberg was somehow still exuberant last weekend about her future career in public health. In January, she interviewed for a competitive Ph.D. program in epidemiology at the University of Washington, one of several to which she has applied. “I loved them. It was amazing,” she told me by phone while on a walk with her Australian shepherd. But the email that arrived from UW shortly after she got home was not the acceptance letter that she’d hoped for. Nor was it even a rejection. Instead, it said that she’d been placed in grad-school purgatory.

The Trump administration has frozen, slashed, threatened, and otherwise obstructed the tens of billions of dollars in funding that universities receive from the government, and then found ways around the court orders that were meant to stop or delay such efforts.

National Association of Scholars Press Release

Excerpt: The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has launched a new report, Waste Land—The Education Department’s Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalism. The report details the Department of Education’s (ED) long and controversial history, its weaponization by bureaucrats and policymakers over the years, and its current state of affairs. A key question explored in this report is one asked by many—what does ED actually do?

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.

Catherine Rampell
Washington Post

Excerpt: Amid all the noise, an eerie hush is spreading across America. Companies, scientific researchers and Trump critics are clamming up as the MAGA movement ushers in a new era of government censorship.

On Day 1, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” This might have sounded like banal lip service, reaffirming commitment to the First Amendment. In reality, it was the start of an Orwellian effort to root out wrongthink from government ranks and the private sector.

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.

Peter Berkowitz
RealClear Politics

Excerpt: It is dawning on some who run our elite colleges and universities – and the intellectuals whom they read – that their institutions desperately need reform. But the administrators and intellectuals assiduously avoid the core matter, which is the transformation of liberal education into progressive indoctrination.

David Brooks recognizes that America’s progressive elites have lost their way. And he correctly identifies the nation’s top universities as a chief cause. But the New York Times columnist and contributing writer at The Atlantic misdiagnoses the disease and advances a remedy that would make matters worse.

AEI Event

Excerpt: On January 27, author Ilya Shapiro joined AEI’s Jeffrey A. Rosen to discuss Mr. Shapiro’s new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites. In his opening remarks, Mr. Shapiro reflected on the “four years of hell” and “purgatory” he experienced as Georgetown Law investigated whether his tweet about President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court pick violated the university’s anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies.

During the event’s discussion portion, Mr. Shapiro defined the key terms “lawless” and “miseducation” in his book’s title, noting that “lawless” refers to law schools’ departure from teaching the law and respecting its legitimacy, and that “miseducation” refers to how the bureaucratic culture in law schools influences students.

Joseph H. Manson 
Minding the Campus

Excerpt: I’ve been a donor to FIRE since 2007, but I’m no longer convinced by its diagnosis or treatment plan for the dire illness afflicting U.S. higher education.

This change in the character of the faculty is the key to understanding why FIRE is wrong not just in its diagnosis but also in its prescription, which is for institutions to respect the same speech rights of faculty that the First Amendment guarantees. (I wonder how serious they are about this, e.g., whether FIRE would defend a professor threatened with termination for uncritically promoting astrology in the classroom).

Eugene Volokh 
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason

Excerpt: I was having a conversation with my Stanford colleague Diego Zambrano, and this perspective on the TikTok case emerged. I'm not positive it's a sound perspective; but I thought I'd pass it along and see what people thought about it.

Scarlet Kim, Daniel Mullkoff
ACLU

Excerpt: A SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) suit brought against Columbia professors who criticized the school’s response to student protests is a classic – and unlawful – way to weaponize our legal system to punish and silence constitutionally-protected speech. The ACLU is back in court to protect our right to free speech.

Laura Spitalniak
Higher Ed Dive 

Excerpt: About one-quarter of faculty members report feeling pressure to match their political views with those held by administrators and other professors at their institutions, according to a new survey from the American Association of Colleges and Universities and the American Association of University Professors.

The pair, with research support from NORC at the University of Chicago, polled faculty on issues relating to academic freedom and free speech — and the results painted a darkening perception of where they say their rights stand.

David Josef Volodzko
The Radicalist, Substack 

Excerpt: As a former educator, I believe education is the cornerstone of democracy, not merely because it equips citizens with the tools to thrive professionally, nor because it deepens our understanding of the human condition through exposure to the arts, but because it fosters the critical capacity to make informed decisions.

Yet how can teachers accomplish this critical task if they are too scared to share their actual viewpoints with the class, even within the areas of their expertise?

Liza Libes 
Minding the Campus 

Excerpt: Ivy League applications are down, and Ivy League schools have begun to panic. Over the past few weeks, America’s most coveted schools welcomed the early decision cohort of the class of 2029. Yet unlike in previous years, which saw a consistent increase in the number of applications and a corresponding decrease in acceptance rates, the data from this year’s admissions pool told a different story.

Maximillian Meyer
New York Post

Excerpt: Americans reacted with horror this week to a new poll that found young voters evenly divided on the righteousness of Luigi Mangione’s cold-blooded assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.  To me, the result was no surprise: I’m seeing far worse on my Ivy League campus every day — the logical result of the morality crisis running rampant throughout “elite” academia and among many of my generation.

To far-left young Americans, on any given issue, the world is divided into two buckets: oppressor and oppressed. There is little room for nuance, and next to none for negotiation. I’ve seen this phenomenon firsthand in my role as president of Princeton’s premier pro-Israel student organization.

FIRE

Excerpt: This report explores insights from a national survey of 6,269 tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure track faculty across 55 four-year colleges and universities in the United States, conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). As the largest survey of faculty ever conducted on this topic, the data reveal faculty attitudes and experiences concerning free expression and academic freedom.

While many faculty remain confident in higher education, and few report explicit threats or experiences of discipline for speech, the broader climate reflects that of rampant self-censorship, worry, and fear, particularly among faculty in the political minority. A discussion of these findings follow. The PDF version of the report is accompanied by school-specific results for each of the 55 colleges and universities surveyed.

Why Evolution is True
Jerry Coyne

Excerpt: A reader called my attention to a new quarterly online magazine called Sapir. It’s edited by the NYT writer Bret Stephens, it’s free, and it has a number of intriguing articles (check out this interview with Daniel Diermeier, our former provost and now chancellor of Vanderbilt University). It also offers a free one-year hard-copy subscription here.

The magazine appears to deal largely but not exclusively with matters Jewish (Stephens’s background). Among the secular pieces is a fine new article by Stephens himself that you can access by clicking on the title below. It’s about the demise of liberalism in American universities, including a defense of what Stephens considers true liberalism and a list of obstacles to university reform. It’s short and well worth reading.

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley’s Blog

Excerpt: As academics, we are dealing with the election on campuses across America. After the election, I had some valuable discussions with students who supported Harris and some who supported Trump. I wish there would be more interaction between the two groups. That is why this story stood out for me. I do not believe that further separation or isolation will help this country or these individuals.

Jonathan Kay and Cass Sunstein
Quillette Podcast

Excerpt: Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with prolific Harvard University legal scholar Cass Sunstein about his new book, Campus Free Speech: A Pocket Guide.

Michael S. Roth
Slate Magazine

Excerpt: It is urgent that the leaders of colleges and universities stand up in defense of their interests and the values of higher education. American schools have long trumpeted their contribution to promoting an educated citizenry. Now, as one of the most consequential elections in American history approaches, we must do everything we can to help students work on campaigns and facilitate voting. And we must call out the threats to higher education.

This may seem straightforward, but in the wake of Oct. 7 and controversies over statements (or the lack of statements) concerning the atrocities, many academic leaders have embraced a doctrine of “institutional neutrality.” This is exactly the wrong time for such a retreat.

John K. Wilson
Academe Blog

Excerpt: The temptation to regulate free speech in the name of a higher good is a constant danger on the left, and the right. Too often, we ignore how centrist administrators and thinkers endorse censorship too easily, and how much power they hold. I think the greatest threats to campus free speech today come from right-wing legislators and wealthy donors seeking to suppress dissent and anxious administrators willing to silence controversial figures on the left or the right. But even well-intentioned arguments by leftists, conservatives, and centrists alike in defense of censorship help weaken the defense of free expression at a time when we need to make it stronger.

Robert Shibley
FIRE

Excerpt: This week, the American Association of University Professors gave its blessing to mandatory “diversity statements” in hiring — as long as the faculty votes for them first. FIRE has long argued that such statements can too easily function as ideological litmus tests and has repeatedly warned against them.

The AAUP’s new statement on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria for Faculty Evaluation” marks yet another departure from the organization’s roots as a stalwart protector of faculty members’ right to dissent from the orthodoxies of the day, whatever those might be.

Cathy Young
The Bulwark

Excerpt: THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA’S DECISION last week to punish tenured law professor Amy Wax with a one-year suspension and other sanctions for what her defenders call controversial opinions—and her detractors call racist hate speech—has been widely criticized as an egregious assault on intellectual freedom.

What ultimately emerges from an attempt to dig through the murky and complicated facts is an all-too-familiar story: that of a once-acclaimed conservative scholar on the path from heterodoxy to crackpottery and from outspoken to deliberately offensive. It is also one of those cases in which supporters of academic freedom must defend the right to express odious views without sugarcoating their odiousness.

Megan Cameron
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: With Election Day just over a month away, Princeton’s politically active student groups are gearing up for a surge of campus engagement. Both the Princeton College Republicans and Princeton College Democrats are planning a series of events aimed at mobilizing students ahead of the Nov. 5 election. These groups are finding ways to encourage political engagement despite University restrictions on political activities, which are enforced by the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students (ODUS), the office under which these groups are registered.

Eleanor Clemans-Cope
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: In a recent feature in The Atlantic, Princeton Lecturer Lauren Wright charges that conservative students on elite liberal college campuses like Princeton’s are constantly challenged and thus better prepared for real-world discourse, while liberal students are coddled and unwilling to engage. She backs this up with interviews from 43 college students — 28 conservatives and 15 liberals at “competitive schools.” But her framing reflects a misunderstanding of what truly constitutes meaningful intellectual and community dialogue on campus. I should know — I was one of her interviewees.

Wright misunderstands a critical aspect of campus dialogue. Liberals do interact with opinions that challenge their own, but they do so on issues that are typically grounded in productive, forward-looking dialogue, like criminal legal system reform, geo-engineered climate solutions, diplomatic engagement between the United States and China, and the morality of consulting jobs.

David French
New York Times

Excerpt: “In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the U.C.L.A. campus because they refused to denounce their faith.” Those are the first words of an angry court opinion by Mark Scarsi, a Federal District Court judge in California.

Jerry A. Coyne
Why Evolution Is True

Excerpt: Most rational people, I believe, are opposed to academic boycotts: those political movements that try to prohibit the exchange of scholars or academic information with countries deemed unacceptable on ideological grounds. These boycotts not only stem the free flow of information among countries that is the lifeblood of academia—especially of science—but also punish those who can contribute to this knowledge even though those people rarely have any influence with their government. Indeed, as in the case of Israel (surely the reason for the dropping of the boycott prohibition), many scholars are opposed to the government’s policies.

Inside Higher Ed reports on the ending of boycotts by the influential organization the American Association of University Professors, an organization that should know better.

John Warner
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: There are a number of recent stories about political acts that are direct attacks on how higher ed institutions operate that have me worried because they lack contemporary precedent.

Consider the gap between a board dedicated to overseeing the health and well-being of the institution and one specifically dedicated to “controlling” the institution, apparently on behalf of the state’s chief executive. Oversight and control are two very different things.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Over the past two years, lawmakers in at least 10 states have pushed legislation that would weaken—or outright eliminate—tenure in public colleges and universities. With the exception of a Democratic state senator in Hawai’i, these bills have all been pushed by Republicans in states such as Texas where the party controls the Legislature.

Despite these proposals, no state has actually gone through with fully banning tenure from its public colleges and universities. The bills that would’ve done so either failed to pass or were watered down before passage after facing opposition from faculty members, who stress that tenure protects academic freedom, including for conservatives, and from university leaders, who say it helps recruit professors who could make more outside academe.

Sam Kahn
Persuasion

Excerpt: The Court has ruled, the results are in, and what we are left with is… the worst of all possible worlds.

In Moody v. NetChoice/NetChoice v. Paxton, the Court espoused a doctrine in which social media companies are viewed as curators or compilers of online material, with the feed constituting a “distinctive expressive offering”—even when those curatorial choices are in fact made by algorithms or AI tools. That philosophy gives the social media companies carte blanche to moderate—or censor—as they wish. Meanwhile, in the highly consequential case Murthy v. Missouri, the Court found that plaintiffs lacked standing to sue the government even when the government had copiously interfered in tech companies’ moderation practices.

Jonathan Zimmerman
Philadelphia Inquirer

Excerpt: How should schools regulate what students post on the internet?
I don’t know. But here’s what I do know: We’ll never craft good policies around online student speech unless we listen to what students have to say.

That’s been the missing voice in the controversy in Great Valley, a Chester County school district where middle school students made 22 TikTok accounts impersonating their teachers. Some of the fake videos were truly horrible, casting the teachers as pedophiles or depicting them in sexual encounters with each other.

Eliot A. Cohen
The Atlantic

Excerpt: After 42 years of academic life—not counting five years spent getting a Ph.D.—I am hanging it up. A while back, I concluded that the conversation that I would most dread overhearing would be an alumna saying to a current student, “I know, I know, but you should have seen the old man in his prime.” I believe I dodged that one.

Brian Rosenberg
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: I suspect that I am not the only former college president who has experienced a mild bout of PTSD during the past several months, as the frequency, intensity, and visibility of attacks on presidents have increased to a level that would have been difficult to imagine even on my worst days.

Leigh Revers
Heterodox STEM

Excerpt: Diversity, equity and inclusion: unless you have been hiding in some ideological ‘safe space’ expunged of today’s wokery —and let’s face it, where in Canada would that be?— these three ubiquitous terms will be instantly familiar to everyone who happens to work in an organization or institution in Canada, whether public or private.

Sean Stevens
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Excerpt: The second edition of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s National Speech Index, released today, finds that both liberals and conservatives are concerned about the future of freedom of speech in the country, regardless of which major party candidate wins the presidential election in November.

The survey also finds that this is where the agreement ends. There are stark differences between liberals and conservatives on the state of freedom of speech in America today and on how often they think colleges and universities should take positions on political issues.

PFS found this video on May 2; it was filmed on April 23
Video filmed at London’s Conway Hall
Niall Ferguson
 
Excerpt:  I know these words sound nice and nobody wants to be against them, but I have to tell you that in George Orwell’s 1984, words mean the opposite of what they appear to mean.
 
What diversity, equity, inclusion turned out to mean at Harvard was uniformity of thought, no equity, no due process for anybody who fell foul of the inquisition, and exclusion of conservatives and indeed anybody who is deemed to be too far to the right, including classical liberals.”

Ted Balaker
The Coddling of the American Mind Movie, Substack

Excerpt: Most of our “DVD extras” are paywalled, but we’re making this one available to everyone. In it, Jonathan Haidt touches on the role universities, specifically administrators, play in encouraging students to think in binary terms, to see the world as battle between good and evil.

Jon references the work of Samuel Abrams, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College. Abrams conducted a national survey of college administrators who work directly with students. He found that “liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one.” That makes administrators the most left-lopsided group on campus

Will Bardenwerper
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Excerpt: The article was so bizarre I thought it might be an April Fool’s hoax, given the April 1 byline. The author of “We must not let eating clubs be ideological safe spaces” in The Daily Princetonian had invited a prominent Princeton professor to join him as a guest for lunch at his “eating club” (essentially a private club serving as hybrid dining hall and fraternity/sorority for Princeton juniors and seniors). He later learned that a “group of membership” felt “caught off guard” when they saw the professor, and they were deeply upset by his presence.

If our future leaders are coddled to the point that they cannot share a dining room with an accomplished professor with whom they disagree, where does that leave us as a country? What good comes from four years spent reinforcing the ideas one arrived on campus with?

Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Universities today feel understandably besieged. State legislators are intervening in curricular debates, members of Congress are taking aim at university presidents, and public support for college is at historic lows. Because criticism of the university from the outside comes most intensely from the right, and professors and administrators on the inside are mostly on the left, it is natural for insiders to respond to external critics by appealing to partisan passions, summoning one another to the barricades, and attempting to repel the barbarian onslaught.

Dialogue Vanderbilt, Vanderbilt University

Excerpt: From our beginning, we’ve believed in the power of bringing together people of differing viewpoints for a common purpose. A long-standing commitment to free expression is fundamental to who we are.

At Vanderbilt, we have a long tradition of free expression. At a moment when free expression on college campuses and in American civic life is at risk, we are proud to affirm our commitment to this core principle.

Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack

Excerpt: About a decade ago, I had a weird idea. At the time, I had for 13 years defended free speech and academic freedom in higher education at FIRE — then the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, now and Expression — but something began to change around 2014. There was a sudden surge in attempts to deplatform speakers, and students were arriving on campus requesting things I’d never heard of, like “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces,” and the policing of “microaggressions.”

I was developing a theory about what happened, but I wanted to talk it through with someone knowledgeable. That’s when I asked Jonathan Haidt out to lunch to discuss it. Jon is a world-renowned social psychologist and professor at New York University. We met at an Indian restaurant near his campus, and I started to lay out my thoughts. What followed was the beginning of a working relationship and friendship that continues to this day.

Rita Koganzon
Hedgehog Review

Excerpt: When I was a graduate teaching assistant at Harvard University a decade ago, one of my students missed a final exam because he forgot to set his alarm. I didn’t learn about this because he told me, in person or even by email; nor did he apologize for his oversight or ask if he could make up the exam. Instead, in the manner customary at Harvard, I was informed by a message from his “Residential Dean,” a faculty member living in the dorms whose job was to liaise between delinquent students and their professors, in part by composing their excuses for them.

This is not some recent, overzealous response to the outsized demands of student activists; it is, rather, an old model that Harvard and only a few other very selective colleges have long followed, but which other schools all over the country now strive to imitate.

Ilya Somin
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Notre Dame law Professor Derek Muller—a leading election law scholar—has posted a study he conducted of the partisan distribution of political donations by law professors between 2017 and 2023. Not surprisingly, they skew overwhelmingly towards Democratic candidates.

The overall result here is far from surprising. Lots of previous studies find that law professors are skew towards the political left. Still, the extent of the imbalance is notable. Exclusively Democratic contributors outnumber exclusively Republican ones by over 35 to 1. That's a larger disproportion than in previous studies.

Emily Nayyer, Sean Stevens
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Excerpt: Cancel Culture is getting worse. As FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff has pointed out many times, more college faculty have been fired during the nine-and-a-half years (and counting) of Cancel Culture, which FIRE defines as roughly starting in 2014 and accelerating past 2017, than lost their jobs during the Red Scare of the 1950s. But who is driving this anti-speech trend on college campuses?

One recent study has pinned the blame on older faculty, but FIRE has its doubts.

Francesca Block
The Free Press

Excerpt: An activist group in California has paid nearly 100 public high schoolers $1,400 each to learn how to fight for racial and social justice, The Free Press has learned.

Contracts between Long Beach Unified School District and Californians for Justice from 2019 to 2023, exclusively obtained by The Free Press, show the school district used taxpayer funds to pay the group nearly $2 million to facilitate equity and leadership development training for students and teachers. In addition to the student stipends, the contracts also allocated a total of $20,200 to 13 parents for participating in the group’s programs.

Yascha Mounk
The Good Fight Podcast, Persuasion, Substack

Excerpt: Larry Summers is an economist, the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School, and a member of the board of directors of OpenAI. Summers is the former President of Harvard University, the former Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton, and was a director of the National Economic Council under Barack Obama.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Larry Summers discuss how universities can re-commit to pursuing truth and protecting academic freedom; how current economic indicators contrast with how many people actually experience the economy; and how Biden can improve his odds for re-election.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: State lawmakers are getting creative in their attempts to control what young people read. Across the U.S., we're seeing legislation aimed at school materials and public libraries.

These measures often wear the mantle of "parental rights" or "protecting kids" from obscenity. But in practice they tend to take aim at any books depicting sex or sexuality. These aren't outright book bans. But they still strike at the heart of things like student privacy and academic freedom, giving the most conservative parents, politicians, or administrators the power to determine what anyone can access of offer at public institutions.