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Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack

Excerpt: the line between these two sides of the argument can’t be so clear-cut, can it? Surely, at least some of the people who argue that words are violence have in fact been punched in the face. So why would they make the argument anyway?

I fear the answer is simple: It's a tactical advantage when facing any speaker you hate. Equating words and violence is a rhetorical escalation designed to protect an all-too-human preference which Nat Hentoff, a dearly departed friend and a great defender of freedom of speech in the 20th century, used to call “Free speech for me, but not for thee.”

David Moshman
Academe Blog

Excerpt: Discussions about campus matters related to Gaza, including posts on this blog, have focused on free speech issues associated with campus protests. Let me shift the focus. Universities should indeed support freedom of speech, but their primary function is to seek and communicate the truth, including the truth about Gaza, and their primary concern should be protecting the freedom to teach and do research about Gaza.

Zach Kessel
National Review

Excerpt: Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Harvard University leaders issued a statement professing to be “heartbroken” over the October 7 Hamas massacre and expressing hope that the university could play a role in fostering dialogue around the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

That statement — roundly criticized as lacking moral clarity —  contrasted sharply with the righteous indignation the university displayed in response to the 2016 presidential election, the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, the killing of George Floyd, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those statements, of course, drew furious criticism from Americans who don’t happen to share the political commitments common in Cambridge.

Nicquel Terry Ellis
CNN

Excerpt: When the police killings of Black people, including George Floyd set off racial unrest across the country in 2020, Marie Vergamini decided she wanted to do her part to help address systemic racism. So, Vergamini, a doctoral student and adjunct instructor at Virginia Commonwealth University, joined a committee of faculty and students who were creating a racial literacy curriculum. The committee planned to make the racial literacy curriculum part of general education requirements for incoming students.

But the decisions to drop the course requirements at VCU and postpone them at George Mason have faced backlash from faculty and students who say the material is meant to prepare students for the real world by offering a better understanding of the nation’s history of racism and discrimination.

Zach Kessel
National Review

Excerpt: Harvard University leaders failed to implement an action plan from the school’s own task force aimed at combatting antisemitism on campus, according to a new report by a House education committee whose chairwoman said the task force was apparently “all for show.”

Robert Parham
The Free Press

Excerpt: If you are graduating from college this year, I suspect you’re not too familiar with George Carlin. So before you become inflamed about the (intentionally) harsh title, let me tell you I plagiarized it from Carlin, who was one of the best American comedians of the last 100 years. His show You Are All Diseased is available on YouTube, and it is so good that I was willing to start by alienating you a bit just to plug it here. You’re welcome. It is especially recommended if you’re in any kind of altered state of mind.

Aaron Sibarium
The Free Beacon

Excerpt: Yale University spent more than a year investigating a Jewish professor for six words of an op-ed he published in a pro-Israel newspaper, raising questions about the school’s approach to anti-Semitism and free speech as the campus continues to cope with the fallout of the Israel-Hamas war.

Sherman Criner
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Excerpt: According to a recent Axios poll, Republican and Democratic college students agree that campuses must broaden free speech “even if there’s some risk of violence.” Moreover, roughly 77 percent of respondents said that free speech “should be protected” regardless of whether someone finds it “deeply upsetting.”

In a time when safe spaces and censorship dominate our universities’ political discourse, some may find this bipartisan support for free speech surprising. After all, other recent polls have illustrated how Republicans and Democrats vehemently disagree on fundamental questions, such as the necessity of political correctness and whether hate speech even exists.

E. Matteo Diaz
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: Who is to blame for our campus’s failing speech culture? Some fault institutional DEI initiatives and the advocates who champion them. According to critics, by drawing sharp distinctions between the oppressed and the oppressor and policing who is entitled to speak on matters of identity, DEI allows identity politics to impede discourse.

These characterizations are extreme and generalized, but they are not entirely wrong. As a transgender person, I’ve seen these dynamics play out within my own community and the dialogue that surrounds it.

Walter Russell Mead
Tablet

Excerpt: Impostor syndrome isn’t always a voice of unwarranted self-doubt that you should stifle. Sometimes, it is the voice of God telling you to stand down. If, for example, you are an academic with a track record of citation lapses, you might not be the right person to lead a famous university through a critical time.

The spectacle of the presidents of three important American universities reduced to helpless gibbering in a 2023 congressional hearing may have passed from the news cycle, but it will resonate in American politics and culture for a long time. Even so, discussing the core mission of their institutions before a national audience is an event that ought to have brought out whatever mental clarity, moral earnestness, and rhetorical skills that three leaders of major American institutions had. My fear is it did exactly that.

Bryan Caplan
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Excerpt: I recently discovered that George Mason University, where I teach, plans to adopt a “Just Societies” course requirement. “Students entering Mason in Fall 2024 or later will be required to take two Mason Core courses that have the Just Societies flag.”

If you read any closer, you unsurprisingly discover that this is a thinly veiled woke-indoctrination requirement. Students are not exploring substantively different views on justice; they are hearing about “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” in all its Orwellian wonder.

Jennifer Schuessler
New York Times

Excerpt: Academic freedom is a bedrock of the modern American university. And lately, it seems to be coming under fire from all directions.

For many scholars, the biggest danger is at public universities in Republican-controlled states like Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has led the passage of laws that restrict what can be taught and spearheaded efforts to reshape whole institutions. But at some elite private campuses, faculty have increasingly begun organizing against a very different threat. Over the past year, faculty groups dedicated to academic freedom have sprung up at Harvard, Yale and Columbia, where even some liberal scholars argue that a prevailing progressive orthodoxy has created a climate of self-censorship and fear that stifles open inquiry.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: The Atlantic is actually becoming a reasonable venue instead of a woke one.  Example in point: this article by podcaster and writer Josh Barro.  We’ve probably encountered most of his indictments before, but he explains why the problems with American universities is making most Americans—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—lose respect for the institutions. Click to read, or, if the article is paywalled,  you can find an archived version here.

John Tomasi
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?” Instead of rising to the moment at a high-profile congressional hearing, Harvard president Claudine Gay ducked into a nearby legal hedge and crouched. The Economist put it kindly: “Sometimes you get the technicalities right but still flunk the test.” What test was flunked? The test of presidential leadership.

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita
Boston Review

Excerpt: While intolerance is a matter of culture, policy and administrative actions play a role in creating the culture. When university leaders who enthusiastically made statements about Black Lives Matter, knowing that such statements would likely discourage free expression of dissenting views on related issues, later assert a deep commitment to free expression concerning genocide of the Jews, they appear to be cynically picking and choosing their principles to suit short-run exigencies.

In this sense, university leaders are lying in a bed of their own making. I suspect at this point many wish they could give something like my First Amendment answer but cannot without facing charges of hypocrisy. One important question, then, is how they might get from here to there.

Ben Sasse
The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (originally printed in The Atlantic).

Excerpt: In the spring of 1994, the top executives of the seven largest tobacco companies testified under oath before Congress that nicotine is not addictive. Nearly 30 years later, Americans remember their laughable claims, their callous indifference, their lawyerly inability to speak plainly, and the general sense that they did not regard themselves as part of a shared American community. Those pampered executives, behaving with such Olympian detachment, put the pejorative big in Big Tobacco.

Last week, something similar happened. Thirty years from now, Americans will likely recall a witness table of presidents—representing not top corporations in one single sector, but the nation’s most powerful educational institutions—refusing to speak plainly, defiantly rejecting any sense that they are part of a “we,” and exhibiting smug moralistic certainty even as they embraced bizarrely immoral positions about anti-Semitism and genocide.

Danielle Allen
Washington Post

Excerpt: Last week Congress put squarely on the table the question of whether the health of our democracy requires renovation of our colleges and universities. I believe the answer to that question is “Yes.”

Important and clarifying as that moment was, the opening statement of Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) gave the hearing a broader frame. Foxx questioned the health of universities generally and called attention to “a grave danger inherent in assenting to the race-based ideology of the radical left,” arguing that we are at “an inflection point” requiring a reshaping of “the future for all of academia.” The chairwoman’s theme was not antisemitism alone but whether the diversity, equity and inclusion efforts of college campuses have been a wrong turn for America’s intellectual culture.

Niall Ferguson
The Free Press

Excerpt: Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill ethical values has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich. A university degree, far from inoculating Germans against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it.

Megan Zahneis
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: A day after M. Elizabeth Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, testified at a congressional hearing about campus antisemitism, the state’s Democratic governor said she had “failed” to “speak and act with moral clarity” and made an implicit call for her removal.

Natasha Lennard
The Intercept

Excerpt: A week after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, by which time Israel’s all-out assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip had killed thousands of civilians, the online editors of the prestigious Harvard Law Review reached out to Rabea Eghbariah.

Eghbariah submitted a draft of a 2,000-word essay by early November. He argued that Israel’s assault on Gaza should be evaluated within and beyond the “legal framework” of “genocide.” In line with the Law Review’s standard procedures, the piece was solicited, commissioned, contracted, submitted, edited, fact checked, copy edited, and approved by the relevant editors. Yet it will never be published with the Harvard Law Review.

Joseph Goldstein
New York Times

Excerpt: A prominent doctor is suing NYU Langone Health after he was fired as director of its cancer center over his social media postings about the Israel-Hamas war. The lawsuit could propel NYU Langone — a major New York hospital — into the center of a national debate over how much power private institutions have to fire employees over their online postings.

Laws protecting employees from being fired for what they say or do outside of the office vary widely by state. In New York, the law is somewhat unclear, lawyers say. But as tensions and protests escalate over the violence in the Middle East, the issue of what sort of speech is protected or acceptable has roiled American businesses and campuses.

Matthew Wilson, Daily Princetonian

 Excerpt: As I write this essay, the despicable poison of Jew-hatred has taken a firm hold at so many college campuses, Princeton included. Here at Princeton, activists proudly chant “Intifada” and demand the complete eradication of the world’s only Jewish state; elsewhere, from Cornell, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania to Ohio State and Cooper Union, frightening (and sometimes violent and illegal) exhibitions of anti-Jewish attitudes abound.

For the most part, university responses to these shameful displays have been tepid and restrained. these same universities, despite being so reticent to speak out now, have a prolonged public history of weighing in on a wide array of hotly contested and politically controversial topics. At Princeton, for instance, recent years have seen official statements issued deploring Supreme Court rulings on abortion and affirmative action, condemning a jury verdict, and attacking a professor for his political views. On Hamas’s terrorist attacks? No official statements.

Richard Amesbury and Catherine O’Donnell
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Academics are losing the support of the public. We read it in newspapers, we see it in surveys, we feel it in our bones. There are many dimensions to this problem. One is the claim that colleges restrict speech and lack intellectual diversity.

Whether and by whom free speech is under threat on campuses are hotly debated questions. Less commonly examined, however, are the assumptions that free speech is a cardinal virtue of higher education, and that colleges should aspire to a diversity of opinions. Are these goals in their own right, as college administrators often seem to think, or means for achieving something else altogether?

David Brooks
New York Times

Excerpt: Over the past five weeks, Jewish students on America’s campuses have found themselves confronted with those who celebrate a terrorist operation that featured the mass murder and reportedly the rape of fellow Jews. They see images of people tearing down posters of kidnapped Jewish children.

Universities are supposed to be centers of inquiry and curiosity — places where people are tolerant of difference and learn about other points of view. Instead, too many have become brutalizing ideological war zones, so today the most hostile place to be an American Jew is not at some formerly restricted country club but on a college campus.

Nell Gluckman
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: When Indiana’s abortion ban took effect, in the fall of 2022, Tamara Kay, a tenured professor in the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, tweeted that she was prepared to help students get access to health care. She hung a sign on her office door with her personal email address and a similar message.

About a month later, The Irish Rover, a student publication that says its mission is to uphold Notre Dame’s Roman Catholic identity, published an article about Kay titled “Keough School Professor Offers Abortion Access to Students.” A subhead read: “Abortion assistance offered to students despite IN law, ND policy.” In the days before the Rover article appeared, a business-school professor texted a student reporter that “there needs to be a coordinated assault on the Tamara Kay issue.”

Bari Weiss
The Free Press

Since Hamas’s October 7 massacre, it has been hard to miss the explosion of antisemitic hate that has gripped college campuses across the country. At Cornell, a student posted a call “to follow [Jews] home and slit their throats,” and a professor said the terror attack “energized” and “exhilarated” him. At Harvard, a mob of students besieged an Israeli student, surrounding him as they bellowed “shame, shame, shame.” At dozens of other campuses, students gathered to celebrate Hamas. 

PEN America

Excerpt: A wave of antisemitic rhetoric, harassment, threats, vandalism and violence has rocked campuses across the U.S. as the Israel-Hamas war escalates. At Cornell University, law enforcement was called in to investigate what the university president called “a series of horrendous, antisemitic messages threatening violence” against the campus’s Jewish community that forced students into lockdown. Drexel University, a women’s restroom was reportedly defaced with antisemitic graffiti and a Jewish student’s dormitory door was set on fire. At Bates College, a swastika was drawn in a public restroom and at American University a swastika and Nazi slogan were graffitied in a student dorm.

Nuria Martinez-Keel
NC Newsline

Excerpt: With the movie release of “Killers of the Flower Moon” only days away, questions still persist about Oklahoma schools’ ability to teach the historical events depicted in the film. The source of the uncertainty is House Bill 1775, a 2021 state law regulating classroom discussions on race and gender.

Tribal leaders have called on the state Legislature to repeal the law, citing widespread confusion and fear among educators who worry teaching unvarnished American and Indigenous history could put them at risk. Educators could lose their teaching license and schools face an accreditation penalty if found in violation of HB 1775.

Sandeep Mangat
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: On Oct. 18, a truck with the message “DEAN JAMAL: WHY DO YOU CODDLE ANTISEMITISM” appeared on Nassau Street with photos of the recent terrorist attack in southern Israel. The truck circulated in town for three days during fall break, targeting Amaney Jamal, Dean of the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA). The group in question has since apologized to Jamal, noting a previous statement she issued condemning Hamas.

The truck was sent by Alums for Campus Fairness (ACF), a group which claims to “counter antisemitism and the demonization of Israel on college and university campuses across the nation.”

Zach Kessel
National Review

Excerpt: Wednesday, October 25, was a national walk-out day ostensibly in support of the Palestinian cause, promoted by activist groups and even some professors who offered extra credit in exchange for participation in the rallies. Just as I did with horrific student-group statements in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, I’ve asked students on campuses across the country to send me footage of what happened at their universities. I will continue to update this post as I receive more.

Sara Weissman
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Five professors laid off by the County College of Morris in New Jersey two years ago may be poised to get their jobs back after a state hearing examiner recently issued a scathing ruling concluding that their layoffs were a retaliatory move related to their union activities.

Samuel J. Abrams
American Enterprise Institute

Excerpt: In a recent and heated discussion about how to address the progressive capture and toxic culture of fear and silence that has engulfed so many of our nation’s colleges and universities, I realized that almost everyone lost sight of how much progress has been made in just a few years.

It is not clear how Florida will play out or if the various institutes and schools being established around the nation will effectively turn the tide. But what is unquestionable is that in a relatively short period of time, the American polity has become aware that there is a problem with expression on college campuses and that states and various groups have mobilized around fixing this crisis.

Elwood Watson
Daily Freeman

Excerpt: Those of us who work in academia understand that academic freedom represents the cornerstone of successful colleges and universities. It epitomizes the right of freedom to teach, discuss, engage in research and freely publish your findings. It also means the ability to dictate one’s own teaching and scholarship agenda, the security of academic positions and shared governance to ensure independence.

Despite such facts, the mission of academic freedom is under severe attack from varied quarters, resulting in ominous and potentially dangerous threats for both students and professors.

Stephanie Lundquist Arora
Washington Examiner

Excerpt: Fairfax County’s school district updated its code of conduct this year to include a “required culturally responsive, learning intervention” for students with first-time “hate speech” infractions. In Fairfax County, hate speech is defined in the broadest sense possible to include “misgendering.”

Fairfax County Public Schools has a history of compelling speech, arguably violating the First Amendment. In the last year, the 12 Democrat-endorsed school board members have made “ misgendering ” and “deadnaming” offenses punishable with suspensions for students as young as 5. It has also implemented a bias incident reporting system , which restricts free speech and is being challenged in courts nationwide

Jenna A. Robinson
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Excerpt: Last week, UNC-Chapel Hill and UNC Charlotte won Heterodox Academy’s “Institutional Excellence Award” for having “done the most to advance or sustain open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement either on its own campus or nationally.”

UNC-Chapel Hill trustee Perrin Jones told the Martin Center, “The Carolina Community—our students, administrators, trustees, and faculty—is in agreement about the important role that freedom of thought, conscience, and speech play within both the university and our broader society.” Jones, who spearheaded trustee efforts on free expression and institutional neutrality, added, “UNC, as it has done before, is proud to lead the way in protecting, and advancing, these freedoms.”

Heterodox Academy Panel Discussion, Wednesday, September 27, 4pm ET

Excerpt: Many colleges and universities are taking, or re-stating, official positions and principles on issues of open inquiry and free expression on campus – sometimes in response to external pressure, or through influence from varying campus groups.

What does this trend tell us, if anything, about the direction of higher education? Are official statements just cheap lip service? Or is this a moment for faculty to organize on campus to create positive change – and if so, what might that look like?

Abigail Anthony
National Review

Excerpt: A Texas public school fired an eighth-grade English teacher who assigned the reading Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, a graphic version of Anne’s unforgettable diary. The adaptation is particularly contentious because it depicts passages in which Anne describes her genitalia, expresses curiosity about the female body, and talks about menstruation.

Perhaps most egregiously, it’s a simplification that dishonors the care that Anne devoted to her writing. The issue is not whether teenagers are prompted to engage with her explicit passages; it’s whether they’re prompted to engage with her writing at all.

Paul Musgrave
Systematic Hatreds, Substack
 
Excerpt: A pair of Stanford scholars committed an op-ed in The New York Times this weekend, arguing that we need to bring back civics education to save democracy. Specifically, they argue, the “intolerance of ideas” that is percolating in American society results from “the failure of higher education to provide students with the kind of shared intellectual framework that we call ‘civic education.’”

I realized just how breathtakingly reactionary the essay is. There was a golden age, and then the wicked neoliberals introduced the elective, and now people are unable to live in a diverse society. To fix our society, we need this one weird trick that will save us from our depredations. Simple as!

Sahar Tartak
Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism

Excerpt: Like many campus clubs, the Yale Free Press (YFP) is a decades-old college paper that has risen and fallen with the times. During the pandemic, the YFP nearly died. Last year, an ambitious editor-in-chief brought it back, but unfortunately felt it was necessary to use the pseudonym “Gentleman Jack.” He wasn’t alone—many writers also went by pseudonyms. Why? The Yale Free Press is right-of-center. Journalists are not immune to fear of retaliation for wrongthink, even at (especially at?) the university level.

This year I’m counting on the maturity of my fellow classmates; I’m betting that by putting my real name on the masthead, I can encourage others to own their opinions, and to treat those with differing opinions with kindness and respect.

Yascha Mounk and Greg Lukianoff
The Good Fight Podcast, Persuasion

Excerpt: In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Greg Lukianoff discuss the state of free speech culture on America’s campuses and in society more broadly; FIRE’s progress litigating against coercive legislation in Florida and elsewhere; and the need to foster cultural habits that uphold individual expression.

September-October 2023
Jonathan Shaw
Harvard Magazine

Excerpt: At Harvard, there are research areas that can’t be investigated, subjects that can’t be broached in public, and ideas that can’t be discussed in a classroom. So says a group of more than 120 Harvard faculty members, who have formed a Council on Academic Freedom to respond to perceived assaults on free inquiry and a climate of eroded trust that they say stifle dissent.

J. David Goodman
New York Times

Excerpt: Cheryl Hensley, a librarian in Houston, was excited for the start of school. A veteran of four decades in the city’s public school system, she had stocked her library at Lockhart Elementary, a mostly Black school, with $40,000 in new books, and won a statewide award for her work. Then, late last month, Ms. Hensley, 62, was told she was no longer needed: The school’s library would be one of dozens turned into multipurpose computer rooms and used, in part, for discipline.

Jeremy C. Young and Jeffrey Sachs
The Daily Beast

Excerpt: The legislative war on college and university free speech has sadly become a persistent feature of the policymaking process in statehouses across the country. Another round of state legislative sessions has come and gone and with it many new proposals that would impose extensive restrictions on what can be taught in higher education classrooms.

Excerpt: Last Wednesday, in the wake of a report that Princeton University will include a book in its syllabus that claims that the IDF had been harvesting Palestinian organs, Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli wrote a letter to the university’s senior leadership, Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber and Dean of Faculty, Professor Gene A. Jarrett.
“I am writing to you as Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, which entails the responsibility of fighting incitement and bigotry against the Jewish People and the State of Israel,” Chikli prefaced the letter.

The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: The diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy has injected progressive politics into many corners of the private economy, but its role in medicine is especially pernicious. Now a lawsuit is challenging whether California can force doctors who teach continuing medical education courses to also teach racial politics.

Washington Examiner Editorial
Washington Examiner

Excerpt: The more documents that Big Tech companies are forced to cough up through litigation and oversight, the clearer it becomes that there was in fact a coordinated campaign between social media platforms and the government to suppress speech that is inconvenient for those in power.

This censorship runs counter to our nation’s founding principles. Congress and litigants should keep up the pressure on social media companies to reveal what they did, and safeguards need to be put in place to make sure this never happens again.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: State governments often pick willing researchers to testify in lawsuits, buttressing their arguments. Outside of litigation, governments also often share data with professors, helping the scholars conduct research and the governments solve problems.

But what happens when researchers who work with a government, outside the courtroom, also testify in a case against that government? In California, the state Department of Education tried to stop one’s testimony and prevent another’s.