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Susan H. Greenberg
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Public colleges and universities in Texas have been asked to identify which of their students are undocumented so they can be charged out-of-state tuition, The Texas Tribune reported. The move follows a district court ruling earlier this month that prohibits students who are not legal residents from paying in-state tuition.

In a letter to the state's public college presidents last week, Texas Higher Education commissioner Wynn Rosser wrote that “each institution must assess the population of students who have established eligibility for Texas resident tuition … who are not lawfully present and will therefore need to be reclassified as non-residents and charged non-resident tuition.”

Jacob Sullum
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Mahmoud Khalil, the first target of President Donald Trump's crusade against international students he describes as "terrorist sympathizers," was released from custody on Friday after more than three months of detention. But the Trump administration is still trying to deport Khalil, a legal permanent resident, based on his participation in anti-Israel protests at Columbia University.

The official rationale for expelling Khalil is that he poses a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. That justification is alarmingly broad and vague, raising due process and free speech concerns that interact with each other.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Ever since Harvard and Columbia Universities refused to accede immediately to all of the Trump administration’s demands to change their policies, federal officials have cut off billions of dollars in funding and deployed other heavy-handed approaches to extract compliance.

But when the administration wanted to alter policies at the U.S. service academies, it simply commanded the changes. The orders were a reminder of how differently service academies operate compared to civilian institutions—and an early example of how the Trump administration could win its war against what it dubs DEI faster at these academies than at private or public state universities.

Juan Perez Jr.
Politico

Excerpt: President Donald Trump’s campaign against two of the planet’s best-known universities is laying bare just how unprepared academia was to confront a hostile White House.

Even as Ivy League schools, research institutions, and college trade associations try to resist Trump’s attacks in court, campus leaders are starting to accept they face only difficult choices: negotiate with the government, mount a painful legal and political fight — or simply try to stay out of sight.

John Avlon and Greg Lukianoff
How to Fix It with John Avlon, The Bulwark

Excerpt: What happens when universities stop defending debate—and politicians start punishing dissent? John Avlon interviews Greg Lukianoff, President of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind. They unpack the escalating war over free speech—from college campuses to the courtroom—and explore how institutions meant to protect liberty are now leading the charge to suppress it.

Jeremy W. Peters
New York Times

Excerpt: As conservatives fought against cancel culture on college campuses, they developed a particular fondness for the First Amendment. It was un-American, they argued, to punish someone for exercising their right to speak freely.

Today, however, many of those same conservatives, now in power in state and federal government, are behind a growing crackdown on political expression at universities, in ways that try to sidestep the Constitution’s free-speech guarantees.

Elena Eiss, Sophie Miller, Emmett Weisz, and Madeline Denker
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: On Feb. 19, a group of students gathered in a Robertson Hall basement classroom. On the tables before them were two poems: “The Diameter of the Bomb” by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai and “Mimesis” by Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah, both highlighting the long-lasting effects of war even after peace has been reached. The meeting — organized by our student group J Street U Princeton — marked one month since the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas went into effect on Jan. 19. 

But heated shouting and partisan divide too often characterize discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Campus activists accuse the University administration of complicity in human rights abuses and make sweeping claims about Israel, alienating their fellow students. Meanwhile, the Trump administration and lobby groups weaponize antisemitism — often in poor faith — conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism and breathlessly depicting campuses as hotbeds of Jew-hatred.

Liam Knox and Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: On Tuesday, the Trump administration fired nearly half of the Education Department’s roughly 4,100 employees, leaving the agency with a skeletal staff of about 2,183. Now, a day later, the scope and impact of those layoffs are beginning to take shape.

The nation’s largest education research agency went from roughly 100 employees to about five, according to a laid-off employee, crippling the government’s capacity to inform education policy. The Office of Federal Student Aid lost hundreds of career staffers, undermining oversight of student loan practices, the maintenance of the federal financial aid system and the authorization of new programs. And the Office for Civil Rights, which fields thousands of student and educator complaints about discrimination and harassment each year, is now down to just five regional offices.

Gabe Kaminsky, Madeleine Rowley, and Maya Sulkin
The Free Press

Excerpt: On Saturday evening, federal immigration authorities arrested an anti-Israel activist who helped lead protests against the Jewish state on Columbia University’s campus after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack. As progressive activists and free speech advocates protested the move to revoke Mahmoud Khalil’s green card over civil liberties concerns Monday, President Donald Trump warned that Khalil’s arrest would be the first “of many to come.”

John T. Groves
Daily Princetonian 

Excerpt: Nine months ago in The Daily Princetonian, I described how the Resources Committee of the Council of the Princeton University Community, which I chair, would take up a divestment and dissociation request related to the State of Israel.

I outlined our approach, promising it would include careful consideration of input from the broad University community, and cautioning that it might be a lengthy process. That process has concluded, and the Committee has decided against forwarding a dissociation recommendation to the Board of Trustees.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: In less than a year, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has completely abandoned its mission.

As U. Chicago law professor Tom Ginsburg points out in a Chronicle of Higher Education piece, however, the AAUP, however, has taken several positions within the last year that are either inimical or orthogonal to academic freedom. To put it frankly, the AAUP has become authoritarian, adhering to “progressive” politics and abandoning those precepts that it once adopted to further academic freedom.

Ellie Wolfe
Baltimore Banner

Excerpt: Faculty at the Naval Academy are no longer permitted to use materials in the classroom that teach about systemic racism and sexism, according to an internal email obtained by The Baltimore Banner.

The changes come as the Trump administration has targeted diversity programs, signing executive orders to shut down diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices across the federal government and halting grant funding for programs that study diversity.

Bill DeMora
The Columbus Dispatch

Excerpt: Though I haven’t served in the Senate long, I’ve seen my fair share of outrageous bills, and Senate Bill 1 stands as the worst by a mile. It’s authoritarian, anti-union, anti-free speech, and a cowardly display of the majority party’s inability to defend its beliefs in the marketplace of ideas unless it can control the entire market.

Still the “Advance Ohio Education Act” was passed by the Ohio Senate. It should be called the Ohio Higher Education Destruction Act.

Allison Stanger 
The Atlantic

Excerpt: In ruling Friday on the future of the social-media app TikTok, the Supreme Court understood it was dealing with a novel issue. “We are conscious that the cases before us involve new technologies with transformative capabilities,” the justices declared in a per curiam opinion. “This challenging new context counsels caution on our part.” 

When the nation’s Founders enshrined freedom of speech in the First Amendment, they couldn’t have imagined phone apps that amplify information around the world almost instantaneously—much less one controlled by a foreign power, as TikTok is, and capable of tracking the movements, relationships, and behaviors of millions of Americans in real time.

Ilya Shapiro
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason 

Excerpt: As I wrote on Monday in my introduction to Lawless, the crisis in higher-ed is different than the decades-old complaint about the liberal takeover of the academy. Instead, university officials placate, facilitate, and even foment illiberal mobs, with everyone else keeping their heads down to avoid the cancellation crossfire. And that's a story of growing bureaucracies.

In the 25 years ending in 2012, the number of professional university employees who don't teach grew at about twice the rate of students, while tuition at public colleges more than tripled. Those trends have only accelerated, though useful statistics are hard to come by as surveyors change methodologies and the government fails to collect or disclose uniform data.

Sophia Vitter
College Fix

Excerpt: The University of Virginia “has willfully ignored its longstanding antisemitism problem” and must address it now, according to the Jefferson Council, an alumni network dedicated to preserving Thomas Jefferson’s legacy at the venerable university.

The alumni group recently published a 13-page report authored by council President Joel Gardner that argues antisemitism has been “exponentially exacerbated” on campus over the last year, following the massacre of Israeli citizens by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2024.

Colleen Flaherty
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: A new Student Voice flash survey on campus speech issues from Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab finds that students most blame other students (versus other groups) for escalating tensions over campus speech. Politicians aren’t off the hook, though, coming in at a close second. At the same time, just one in 10 students is very concerned about the climate for campus speech at their institution; another three in 10 are somewhat concerned. A bigger share of students say they’re concerned to some degree about the climate for speech across higher education, however.

Jack Grove
Times Higher Education

Excerpt: More than three-quarters of university staff feel academic freedom of speech is more restricted in their country than it was 10 years ago, a major survey has found.

This sense that free speech on campus has been chilled is particularly strong in the US, where 83 per cent of respondents felt this was the case, and in psychology (80 per cent) and clinical health (89 per cent), where sex and gender issues loom large.

Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Last Dec. 5, the presidents of three leading universities stepped before Congress for a hearing on campus antisemitism that was widely criticized when they failed to offer forthright responses on whether hypothetical calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their institutions’ policies. Those three presidents—representing Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—were followed by four others in two separate hearings in April and May as pro-Palestinian student protests swept campuses across the nation last spring.

Of the seven campus leaders who testified, only two remain on the job (though one was already on the way out). Here’s a look at where all seven leaders are today.

William Deresiewicz
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions — as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate — have been rejected. This was already evident before November 5. It can now no longer be denied.

The Eternally Radical Idea
Greg Lukianoff

Excerpt: One of the great disappointments of my professional life has been watching the decline of the American Association of University Professors, formerly the gold standard for defense of academic freedom on campus. Of course, there have always been and still are good, principled AAUP members and chapters out there. But since the beginning of my career back in 2001, the national AAUP have gone from being principled (if slow and plodding) defenders of academic freedom to increasingly partisan critics of freedom of speech and the First Amendment — taking institutional positions that directly threaten academic freedom.

And then a small group of college administrators decided to blow it all up.

Joan W. Scott
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The vice president of campus advocacy of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Alex Morey, has recently launched an unprecedented attack on the American Association of University Professors. She was quoted in Inside Higher Ed on Nov. 8 effectively offering an obituary for the organization in response to AAUP president Todd Wolfson’s expression of “disappointment” at the election of Donald Trump: “Faculty who’ve long relied on the AAUP for its principled academic freedom advice should look elsewhere,” Morey said.

Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: House Republicans lambasted private elite colleges and some state flagship universities for how they’ve handled pro-Palestinian protests in a new report in which they argue that antisemitism has engulfed college campuses and administrators prioritized “terrorist sympathizers” over the Jewish community.

In the scathing 325-page report released Thursday, Republicans on House Education and Workforce Committee detailed the findings of their yearlong investigation into antisemitism at 11 colleges. Most of the findings reiterated many of the same points they’ve been making publicly since Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Nikki Han
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: In a public lecture given on the evening of Tuesday, Oct. 22, Angela Davis reflected on the importance of voting in elections, solidarity and support for Palestine, and her end goal of revolution.

The 445 seats in McCosh Hall 50 were not enough to hold the large turnout, with dozens standing against the walls and lining the stairs to hear Davis in conversation with Professor of African American Studies Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. About 100 people also congregated in an overflow room down the hall to watch the event virtually.

Joseph De Avila
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Amy Wax, the Ivy League law professor suspended for making racist, sexist and inflammatory comments, stands to lose half a million dollars from her punishment.

Wax said she doesn’t regret the remarks that led to her reprimand. She is considering taking legal action, she said.

Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Pro-Palestinian protest activity has declined on college campuses this semester, at least compared to the tumultuous events of last spring.

But several of the demonstrations that resulted in student sanctions this fall have taken place at university career fairs, where activists gathered to protest weapons manufacturers and other companies with ties to the Israeli government or military. Many are the same companies that pro-Palestinian student protesters have demanded their universities divest from over the past year, albeit with little success.

Pamela Paul
New York Times

Excerpt: Last week Jonathan Holloway, the president of Rutgers University, announced he would be stepping down at the end of this academic year — the latest in a series of university president departures.

Given the widespread discord and protests on campuses, the past academic year was tough for any college president. But unlike others who left their posts, like Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay of Harvard, Holloway isn’t leaving the kind of elite institution that tends to attract outraged headlines and ire. Nor was he resigning in a heated moment of backlash or scandal. So why did he do it?

Alan Singer
Academe Blog

Excerpt: In times of crisis, academics must be public intellectuals. Why invest our lives in becoming experts in history, society, policy, science, or any other field of study and then remain isolated in an academic cocoon for safety or career advancement? The consequences of silence for our profession and our society are too great.

Sadly, because of the power of money in American politics and in higher education, in a very real sense, only academics as public intellectuals remain in a position to respond to concerted silencing. But know when you speak, whether in the classroom or in a public forum, there will be consequences.

William Harris
FIRE

Excerpt: FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings show that roughly a quarter of students think it is not clear that their administration protects free speech on campus. And if a free speech controversy were to erupt? More than a quarter believe their administration would be unlikely to defend a speaker’s right to express their views.

America's colleges and universities should be bastions of free speech. Yet, these abysmal scores show they are not. Alumni don’t have to reward universities that flunk out on free speech: They can donate to FIRE in lieu of making a gift to their alma mater.

Ashleigh Fields
The Hill

Excerpt: Americans are placing less value on the First Amendment than they did four years ago, according to a new survey. A Freedom Forum report showed 58 percent of people say they would approve the First Amendment today, a 4-point drop from 2020.

Despite the decrease in importance, respondents said the right to free speech will influence their vote this fall. More than half of Americans in the Northeast said the First Amendment is relevant to their decision this fall, compared to 49 percent in the Midwest.

Eugene Volokh
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Next week, the entire en banc Fifth Circuit will be hearing Little v. Llano County, a case involving allegations of viewpoint-based book removals in a public library. As I've noted before, the Supreme Court has never resolved whether such removals are unconstitutional. Pico v. Bd. of Ed. (1982), which considered the matter as to public school libraries, split 4-4 on the subject, with the ninth Justice, Justice White, expressly declining to resolve the substantive question.

I'm not sure what the answer here should be. I tentatively think a public school is entitled to decide which viewpoints to promote through its own library: School authorities can decide that their library will be a place where they provide books they recommend as particularly interesting/useful/enlightening/etc., essentially as supplements to the school curriculum (over which the school has broad authority).

Liam Knox
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Selective colleges began unveiling demographic data for the Class of 2028, the first admitted after the 2023 affirmative action ban, just a few weeks ago, and already legal threats are flying.

Students for Fair Admissions, whose lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina led the Supreme Court to strike down race-conscious admissions last June, wrote letters on Tuesday to the general counsels of Yale, Princeton and Duke Universities asking for details about their admissions processes, accusing them of noncompliance with the ruling. In the letters, obtained by Inside Higher Ed, SFFA president Ed Blum said he was “deeply concerned” that the institutions had violated the affirmative action ban.

Matthew Kuchem
The Dispatch

Excerpt: Even though many academics and commentators have explored why higher education has gone off track—and how reformers might course-correct—it is worth stepping back to notice how today’s campus disputes are just one more theater in the culture wars. The intolerance and mutual antipathy of ideological opponents on both the left and the right undermine two of the most important rights and institutions in our liberal democracy: freedom of speech and universities.

It is therefore worth thinking carefully about how culture wars corrode liberalism and sabotage civil discourse, and to consider ways to stop them from wreaking more havoc on campus.

Jamie Saxon
Princeton Office of Communications

Excerpt: In his third year leading an Orientation session on academic freedom and free expression, President Christopher L. Eisgruber encouraged transfer and first-year students to make the most of the “transformative” opportunity they’ll have at Princeton to meet and learn from others with whom they disagree.

Niall Ferguson and Jacob Howland
The Atlantic

Excerpt: You’re in. You’ve been admitted. And soon your parents will drop you off at your new university. It’s thrilling. It’s daunting. But what will you actually be studying in your freshman year?

All universities claim to provide some kind of intellectual foundation for their students. Sadly, the reality of what freshmen and sophomores are required to study usually belies the admissions-office propaganda.

Featured
Ron Krebs and Cary Nelson
Petition

On Friday, August 9, 2024, the American Association of University Professors, which has long eloquently defended the core principle of academic freedom, reversed course and declared academic boycotts legitimate.

We believe the AAUP’s new position is wrong-headed and dangerous. We cannot safeguard academic freedom by violating academic freedom. Normalizing academic boycotts poses a profound threat to academic freedom.

Richard K. Vedder
Independent Institute

Excerpt: For learning and discovery communities to flourish, there has to be a diversity of ideas that are explored and debated, with multiple perspectives discussed civilly by veteran scholars—the faculty—as well as inquisitive young learners—the students. While campuses in recent years have obsessed over what are intellectually relatively unimportant dimensions of diversity, such as the skin color of participants in the scholarly enterprise, they increasingly have imposed a leftist monopoly on the exploration of ideas on many campuses, including the nation’s most prestigious ones. A progressive agenda reigns, and questioning it is increasingly rare as woke leaders impose their ideas on the campus community.

Mitch Daniels
Washington Post

Excerpt: Dan Patrick’s sports radio talk show, which I regard as the country’s best, winds up its daily program with a segment called “What did we learn?” As America’s colleges return to work for the fall semester, after anti-Israel protests in the spring dealt yet another blow to their fading reputations and attractiveness, they should be asking themselves that question in earnest. After decades of money pouring in and smug self-satisfaction, the answer won’t come easily.

Yuval Levin
Commentary

Excerpt: We seem to have reached a pivotal moment in the long-running battle for the soul of the American university.

The only positive effect of the campus crisis that followed October 7 has been the clarity it has provided. We have entered a phase of the university crisis in which this character of the dispute is clearer than ever. And it is therefore a phase in which the potential for some effective action against the academic revolutionaries and in defense of the traditional ethos of the university may be greater than it has been in half a century.

Justo Atonio Triana
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Growing up in Cuba, I had to measure with surgical precision each of my words at school, knowing they could possibly be deemed “problematic,” meaning “counterrevolutionary,” meaning I — or worse, my family — could get in serious trouble for what I said.

Arriving in the United States in 2019, I again found myself self-censoring in a classroom.

Jay Bhattacharya & Wesley J. Smith

RealClearPolitics

The New England Journal of Medicine recently published an advocacy article that attacks academic freedom and urges stifling contentious campus debates. Specifically, Evan Mullen, Eric J. Topol, and Abraham Verghese urge universities to “speak out publicly” and issue official institutional opinions about public controversies involving its professors “when it concludes that a faculty member’s opinion could cause public harm.”

FIRE

Excerpt: University of Wisconsin-La Crosse chancellor Joe Gow was fired for producing porn off the clock. Tomorrow, UW will go after his tenured position after donors and politicians threatened to pull their support. Firing him would crash into the First Amendment.

Academic freedom generally protects faculty from punishment for what they do or say off the clock. The same law that shields faculty from getting fired or punished for their political opinions or associations also protects their right to create porn.

Julia Steinberg
Free Press, Substack

Excerpt: The Stanford Internet Observatory—a research center tasked with rooting out “misinformation” on social media—is shutting its doors. Chances are if you’ve heard of the SIO it was in a scathing piece from Michael Shellenberger or Matt Taibbi, who have accused the center of being a key node in the censorship-industrial complex.

In actuality, SIO hired a load of interns to scan social media for posts deemed to be mis- and disinformation.

Nathan Honeycutt
FIRE

Excerpt: Confidence in higher education has plummeted to its lowest level ever according to the results of two new national polls commissioned by FIRE and conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.

Per the polls, American confidence in higher education has plummeted over the past year, reaching record lows after months of campus protests over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Congressional hearings about anti-Semitism on college campuses.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: On Monday morning, the student-edited Columbia Law Review published its latest issue online. Hours later, the website became a blank white space with a one-line note saying, “Website is under maintenance.”

The issue had contained an article by Rabea Eghbariah, the same Palestinian Harvard University law degree candidate who had a different piece rejected by the Harvard Law Review in November after an unusual editorial intervention. Unlike what happened at Harvard, Eghbariah received the Columbia Law Review’s imprimatur for this new article and saw it published. But not for long. On Monday morning—seven hours after the article was published, according to one outgoing student editor, Erika Lopez—the Review’s Board of Directors, which includes the law school’s dean and other faculty members and alumni, took down the Review’s entire website due to Eghbariah's article.

John Engler and Jeffrey O. Nelson
Wall Street Journal
 
Excerpt: Justice Samuel Alito this month warned that freedom of speech on campuses and in many corridors of American society is imperiled.

Chaos is crippling America’s universities, which are now hubs of protest rather than learning. Anti-Israel encampments on some campuses have become beachheads for violence where reasoned debate and expression once flourished.

Elisabeth Stewart
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Following a petition by six faculty members in late April, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 has called a special meeting of the faculty for 4:30 p.m. on Monday, May 20.

The proposal — drafted by Molly Greene GS ’93, Ruha Benjamin, Dan-El Padilla Peralta ’06, Lidal Dror, V. Mitch McEwen, and Curtis Deutsch — asks the faculty to consider “the granting of amnesty to students and other university affiliates involved in peaceful free speech and assembly for justice in Palestine,” including the encampment, sit-in, and hunger strike. As of the hunger strike's ninth day, thirteen of the original participants have broken their strike, replaced by seven new strikers. The meeting agenda will include only one proposal regarding student discipline and free speech.

Derek Thompson
The Atlantic

Excerpt: Last month, the Pomona College economist Gary N. Smith calculated that the number of tenured and tenure-track professors at his school declined from 1990 to 2022, while the number of administrators nearly sextupled in that period. “Happily, there is a simple solution,” Smith wrote in a droll Washington Post column. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift, his modest proposal called to get rid of all faculty and students at Pomona so that the college could fulfill its destiny as an institution run by and for nonteaching bureaucrats.

The world has more pressing issues than overstaffing at America’s colleges. But it’s nonetheless a real problem that could be a factor in rising college costs.