Franklin Foer
The Atlantic
Excerpt: The email landed at 10 minutes to midnight on a Friday in early April—a more menacing email than Alan Garber had imagined. The Harvard president had been warned that something was coming. His university had drawn the unwanted and sustained attention of the White House, and he’d spent weeks scrambling to stave off whatever blow was coming, calling his institution’s influential alumni and highly paid fixers to arrange a meeting with someone—anyone—in the administration.
Garber wanted an audience because he believed that Harvard had a case to make. The administration had been publicly flogging elite universities for failing to confront campus anti-Semitism. But Garber—a practicing Jew with a brother living in Israel—believed Harvard had done exactly that.
Susan H. Greenberg
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Columbia University is preparing to strike a deal with the Trump administration, taking steps to address alleged civil rights violations on campus in exchange for the release of $400 million of withheld federal funds, The Wall Street Journal and CNN reported.
According to the Journal, the university is in discussions with the administration to pay out roughly $200 million, some of which would go to the government and some to students and professors who allegedly have had their rights violated.
Jocelyn Kaiser
Science
Excerpt: Talk about policy whiplash. This morning, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) lifted a pause on funding to Columbia University, according to an internal memo viewed by Science. A few hours later, the agency refroze money to the school.
Earlier today in an email Science saw and was first described on Bluesky by Nature, NIH told its program officers money can flow again to Columbia. Michelle Bulls, director of the agency’s Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration, around 9 a.m. wrote to NIH grants staff: “Great news, we have been told that we can resume funding awards to Columbia (funding pause has been lifted).” But less than 6 hours later, some grants staff were informed that Columbia awards were back on hold.
FIRE Intern
FIRE
Excerpt: After a news story last week that the University of Michigan was paying private investigators to spy on pro-Palestinian student protesters, the school quickly ended its contracts with the surveillance firm.
Now the university says this Orwellian practice has ended, but the chill on student speech will likely remain for some time.
By Nick Perrino
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
Maybe you're sick of hearing news about Harvard. We can't blame you.
But as free speech defenders, we go where the censorship is. The government picks the targets, not us. And — once again — the government is unconstitutionally targeting Harvard.
You don't have to like Harvard to oppose the government's recent demands of the university.
Tal Fortgang
Civitas Institute, The University of Texas at Austin
Excerpt: The Trump administration and the leadership of Harvard University are both posturing as principled heroes taking a stand against an unscrupulous enemy. The federal government has appointed a task force to combat anti-Semitism, the most apparent manifestation of corruption at progressive-captured institutions, most notably elite universities. Harvard, for its part, has roared back.
Each is right, in a way – and each is wrong. Accordingly, each party has a leg to stand on in this showdown, but each seems to use that leg only to misstep.
Meghana Veldhuis
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: In light of recent scrutiny on higher education by the U.S. federal government, on April 2, the Princeton Council on Academic Freedom (PCAF) held a roundtable discussion in McCosh Hall titled, “Should Universities Engage in Politics?”
The discussion was moderated by Princeton politics professor Frances Lee. University of Chicago philosophy professor Anton Ford, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy ’77, and Yale politics professor Keith Whittington all shared their opinions on the role that Princeton and other universities should generally play during a time of turmoil in higher education.
Eugene Volokh, Michael C. Dorf, David Cole, and 15 other scholars
The New York Review
Excerpt: We write as constitutional scholars—some liberal and some conservative—who seek to defend academic freedom and the First Amendment in the wake of the federal government’s recent treatment of Columbia University.
The First Amendment protects speech many of us find wrongheaded or deeply offensive, including anti-Israel advocacy and even antisemitic advocacy. The government may not threaten funding cuts as a tool to pressure recipients into suppressing such viewpoints. This is especially so for universities, which should be committed to respecting free speech.
FIRE
Excerpt: The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of an LGBTQ+ student organization to block a new policy from the Texas A&M University System that bans drag performances on its 11 public campuses — a clear violation of the First Amendment.
John Warner
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Together, we should be clear on what President Donald Trump is trying to do to higher education.
Destroy it. Whatever public rationales he or his administration release, the intent of his actions is clear, so if we’re going to discuss responses to those actions, we must remember, always, that Donald Trump is trying to destroy higher education.
Ian Bogost
The Atlantic
Excerpt: The Department of Health and Human Services has told employees of several health agencies, including the NIH, to stop communicating with the public. Even more disruptive for universities, the committee meetings for reviewing NIH grant proposals have also been abruptly put on hold until at least February 1.
“This will halt science and devastate research budgets in universities,” Jane Liebschutz, a medical doctor and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, posted on Bluesky, in reference to the grant-review shutdown. The UCLA professor Lindsay Wiley echoed the sentiment, adding on Bluesky that the pause, which affects the distribution of a multibillion-dollar pool of public-research money, “will have long-term effects on medicine & short-term effects on state, higher education & hospital budgets. This affects all of us, not just researchers.”
Greg Lukianoff
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression
Excerpt: Dear President Trump,
My name is Greg Lukianoff, and I am the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that defends the rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought.
Last year was the worst year on record for free speech on college campuses. We’re still facing a deluge of campus censorship cases related to October 7 and its aftermath. More attempts were made to deplatform speakers on campus than any year since FIRE began tracking in 1998. And professors are censoring themselves more now than at the height of the McCarthy era.
By Stuart Taylor, Jr. and Edward Yingling, The Wall Street Journal
Readers of these pages are well aware that free speech, academic freedom and viewpoint diversity are in big trouble at U.S. universities.
Over the past year, President Donald Trump’s administration has targeted international students in a series of restrictions, citing concerns about national security. Fear has spread among international students at Princeton, where 13% of undergraduates — and 45% of grad students — come from abroad. “This is not the safe haven that it was supposed to be,” B. ’27, a Princeton student from Latin America, told PAW.
The recent news about plummeting math preparation among University of California, San Diego, students was startling: Over five years, the number of incoming students deemed to need remedial math courses before taking calculus had risen from 32 in 2020 to more than 900 last fall.
Math achievement declines across the country are real, but data from a single campus is not representative, even if it makes national news. In fact, UCSD offers a poor reference point for policy discussions in California and most other states, given how unique its approach to math proficiency has been.
Northwestern University’s “Black Friday” agreement to pay $75 million to the Trump administration in exchange for regaining access to about $790 million in federal research funding raises free speech concerns, experts say.
“Northwestern has allowed its institutional judgment in terms of academic freedom, in terms of student speech, in terms of admissions criteria... to be overriden by the demands of the federal government, and that raises serious First Amendment problems,” said Northwestern law professor Heidi Kitrosser, a constitutional law expert.
From congressional hearings to donor revolts to headlines about campus protests, American universities are being told—loudly—that they’ve lost the public’s trust. But beneath the noise, there’s a quieter question that rarely gets asked: when Americans criticize universities, what do they actually want them to do instead?
A new study published in Science Advances by economists at Cornell University and the University of Regensburg examines what societal roles Americans believe universities should engage in beyond their core mission of education and research.
Duke’s fight against the Trump administration has a new front: employee speech. After the White House accused the school of maintaining unlawful racial preferences and cut millions of dollars in research funding as punishment, the University ordered its employees to keep silent.
In late August, Jenny Edmonds, Sanford School of Public Policy’s associate dean of communications and marketing, emailed faculty members that all requests about “Duke and current events” must go through the University’s PR office. She cited increased scrutiny on universities and their policies and admonished faculty to stay in their lanes, discussing only their research with the media. While Edmonds’s message was limited to the public policy school, faculty across the university got similar messages.
Adam Goldstein
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: A recent essay in these pages by Charles F. Walker posits that the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s rankings don’t actually measure the speech climate of college campuses because they penalize colleges for disruptive speech that is constitutionally protected. Walker’s argument is rooted in a number of misconceptions, not the least of which is that he seems not to understand what the rankings are for. Moreover, he misrepresents the law around disruptive protests. But because the first problem swallows the second, let’s start there.
Nate Honeycutt
Expression, FIRE
Excerpt: When a scholar is targeted for their expression, the story rarely ends when the headlines fade. The formal investigations wrap up and the social media outrage may die down, but for many, the experience marks a permanent shift in how they think, speak, and interact with others in public. Such cases have profound implications for academic freedom and the state of campus free speech in higher education.
According to FIRE’s Sanctioned Scholars report, nearly three-quarters of the scholars we asked said they would not change anything they said or did that led to being targeted. But many also said that, in other ways, they are now altering their speech.
Sarah McLaughlin
FIRE, The Free Speech Podcast
Excerpt: FIRE Senior Scholar Sarah McLaughlin discusses her new book, "Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech."
Emma Whitford
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: As conservative Texas politicians identify and target faculty who teach about gender identity, officials at six Texas public university systems have ordered reviews of curriculum, syllabi and course descriptions.
The impetus is clear: Texas A&M University fired a professor, demoted two administrators and pushed out its president after conservative politicians lambasted the institution for a lesson on gender identity in a children’s literature class. Their criticism hinged on the fact that the topic was not reflected in the brief course catalog description for the class. Before he resigned, Texas A&M president Mark Welsh ordered an audit of all courses at the flagship campus, which the system Board of Regents quickly extended to all Texas A&M institutions.
Sabrina Tavernise
New York Times
Excerpt: Two days after Charlie Kirk was killed, Suzanne Swierc, an employee at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., woke up to a cascade of missed calls, texts and voice mail messages from numbers she did not know.
Ms. Swierc (pronounced swirtz) discovered that the barrage stemmed from something she had posted on Facebook the day before: “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.” Her Facebook settings were private, but one of her followers must have taken a screen shot and sent it on without her knowledge.
J. D. Tuccille
Reason Magazine
Excerpt: The First Amendment is alive and well, which is a reassuring note about the basic legal protections for free speech. Unfortunately, it's not enough. The world is full of countries with written protections for liberty that are frequently honored in the breach because people and politicians don't really believe in them (cough, Canada, cough). The true foundation for free speech in the U.S. has always been a culture that supports unfettered expression, of which the First Amendment is just an extension.
But less than two weeks after Charlie Kirk was murdered because an assassin apparently didn't like what he had to say, it's obvious that free speech culture is besieged.
David Sims
The Atlantic
Excerpt: There have already been signs that President Donald Trump’s administration is intent on punishing perceived critics in the media, no matter what complaints about free speech might arise, but the chain of events that shut down Jimmy Kimmel Live feels particularly direct. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said on Benny Johnson’s podcast yesterday.
“These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Within hours, Nexstar, a company that operates 32 of ABC’s 200 local affiliates, said it would not broadcast Kimmel’s show for the “foreseeable future.” Quickly after that, ABC announced its decision.
Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
The Atlantic
Excerpt: A decade ago, when the government of Singapore announced its decision to pulp every copy of our picture book, And Tango Makes Three, in the nation’s libraries, we felt profoundly lucky. Not for the pulping—that was alarming—but for the fact that the First Amendment guaranteed that this could never happen in America.
We’re not feeling quite so lucky anymore. In 2023, our book was one of thousands pulled from library shelves around the country, and as we write, an evolving legal strategy being used to defend many such bans threatens to upend decades of precedent preserving the right to read. The danger this doctrine poses to free speech should worry us all—even those who would rather their children not learn about gay penguins.
Francie Diep and Eric Kelderman
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Across the country, faculty activism is surging — a “direct result” of the federal government’s “attacks” on higher education, said Kelly Benjamin, a spokesperson for the national AAUP. Between January 1 and July 31 of 2025, the AAUP saw membership in its nonunion chapters, like Harvard’s, grow by 57 percent.
Interest in the AAUP seems especially intense at some of the most recognizable brand-name colleges, including those in the Ivy League. All of those chapters grew in 2025 — all but two of them faster than the national average. Columbia’s membership more than doubled. Princeton’s more than tripled.
Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Columbia University’s acting president says the institution is incorporating the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism into the Office of Institutional Equity’s work. That office investigates discrimination complaints against students and employees.
“Formally adding the consideration of the IHRA definition into our existing anti-discrimination policies strengthens our approach to combating antisemitism,” Claire Shipman said in a statement Tuesday announcing “additional commitments to combatting antisemitism.”
Cathy Young
The Bulwark
Excerpt: Last month's annual conference of the Heterodox Academy, a group founded ten years ago by psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt to support intellectual diversity in academia, had to confront a cultural and political landscape drastically changed from previous years. “HxA,” as the group styles itself, is known for taking on threats to academic freedom and intellectual openness from the progressive (or, if you will, “woke”) left. But this is 2025, not 2015. Not only is Donald Trump in the White House again, but his second administration is waging an aggressive attack on the universities in a crusade against academic “wokeness.”
