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Dissident Dialogues

Excerpt: Leading academics come together to discuss and debate whether Western universities can be saved from peril. With free speech on campus in jeopardy, and weekly Palestine protests following years of attacks on curriculum and the pulling down of statues. Can they be salvaged or do new universities need to be built?

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Press Release

Excerpt: Human rights experts today expressed grave concern at the massive crackdown on pro-Palestinian student protests at various university campuses across the United States of America.

“The banning and attacks on student protests are a grave violation of the rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression guaranteed by international human rights law, and must stop immediately,” said the experts, who addressed their concerns to the US government in a previous communication.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: As the news broke about a gunman’s July 13 attempt to kill former president Donald Trump during a Pennsylvania rally, John James, an English instructor at Bellarmine University in Louisville, posted on Instagram above one of the latest headlines: “If you’re gonna shoot, man, don’t miss.”

That university said it received a bomb threat July 15 connected to anger over the post, though police eventually determined the threat wasn’t credible. Bellarmine fired James the next day, three days after the shooting, he said. “I wasn’t given an opportunity to clarify my statement, to apologize or anything,” he said.

Jess Deutsch
Princeton Alumni Weekly  

Excerpt: While 120 hostages remained captive and the death toll in Israel and Gaza continued to rise, President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 described the last year as the “most turbulent and difficult on college campuses in the U.S. since the late 1960s.” With world news weighing heavily this spring and campus protests broadcasted widely, I wondered about the impact of the war and protests on the mental health impact Princeton students and alumni.

At Princeton’s encampment, students seemed to talk within their own bubbles or make statements using a megaphone. Students, faculty, and staff often walked by, heads down. As the semester was ending, more than one student who had no involvement told me they couldn’t wait to leave campus, scared to say the wrong thing. I worried about the conversations that didn’t happen.

Matthew Kuchem
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: As the U.S. presidential campaign takes a violent turn, colleges and universities need to prepare for major political upheaval and campus disruptions. Last academic year’s campus protests demonstrated that much of higher education is ill-equipped to handle certain political controversies.

But the fall will not just be a redux of the spring. When students return to campuses, the wild presidential campaign will be entering the final stretch, setting the stage for disruptions that will accelerate through the end of the semester and possibly beyond. The forecast is grim, and the conditions are ripe, not for a flare-up but for an inferno.

Alex Morey
Persuasion

Excerpt: “College administrator tries to silence faculty critics” is hardly a new scenario. But the censors usually aren’t quite so upfront about it.

There are many reasons why sanctioning faculty who speak out against the university is dangerous. Most obviously, it would gut their expressive rights to publicly criticize Harvard’s shortcomings or abuses, amounting to the kind of “professionalism” policy colleges routinely abuse to punish all manner of controversial student and faculty speech. An administrator need only deem speech unprofessional, and they’ve found a convenient loophole around their academic freedom and free speech policies.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: In 2022, Florida’s Republican state legislators passed the Stop WOKE Act, championed and signed by GOP governor Ron DeSantis. The law would limit the way faculty members at public universities can teach about race and gender.

Attention-grabbing oral arguments a week ago before the U.S. Court of Appeals’ 11th Circuit conveyed what could happen if they lose. A heavy-hitting Washington lawyer, known for representing big-name Republicans and now defending the Florida law, made a series of arguments that academic freedom advocates have called “extreme.” If judges adopt these conclusions, they say, states could demolish the tradition of academic freedom in American higher education.

Peter Berkowitz
RealClearPolitics

Excerpt: Following Hamas’ bloodthirsty Oct. 7 assault on Israel’s southern border communities, woke leftists and jihad enthusiasts on campuses and beyond formed a perplexing alliance. The left advocates social justice; celebrates diversity, equity, and inclusion; and professes special concern for historically oppressed minorities. Meanwhile, Gaza’s Iran-backed jihadists torture and kill based on race, ethnicity, and sexual preference; loathe and wage war against Israelis, Jews, Americans, and the West; and, by all available means, seek to establish Islamist theocracy. What could unite two such seemingly mutually exclusive camps?

Katrina Lantos Swett
RealClearPolitics

Excerpt: I graduated from Yale University in 1974. As a first-generation American, the child of Holocaust survivors, and among the first women admitted to this incredible school, it is hard to adequately express how grateful I was for this opportunity. I have enjoyed returning to campus frequently over the years, including watching two of my own children graduate from Yale.

Michael Brendan Dougherty
National Review

Excerpt: Conservatives have sought to prevent the encampments from spreading by drawing strong distinctions between free-speech protections for the students and standards of manners, anti-harassment regulations, and the like. This may be what is legally required of state universities like the University of Florida, where Ben Sasse made those distinctions as clear as possible.

But it’s entirely inadequate for the role that Columbia and the other Ivy League colleges want to play in our republic. The standard is not just free speech, or more speech to counter bad speech, but truthful speech.

Patrick Jaojoco, Brandi Bushman, and Humza Gondal (and many undersigned)
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: We — the undersigned leaders, community members, and allies of cultural affinity groups of Princeton University — condemn in the strongest possible terms the University’s utter disregard for the safety and wellbeing of its students of color, the ongoing racist policing of students of color, and a total dismissal of the demands for divestment that our communities have made through peaceful demonstrations.

When Princeton’s endowment supports the state of Israel (and U.S. military action), which is committing a genocide that actively targets the families, friends, and communities of Palestinian students, it is clear that our safety is not on your list of priorities.

Lauren Gutterman and Lisa L. Moore
Academe Blog

Excerpt: On February 22nd, 2024, Dr. Paige Schilt, a social worker, author, and former lecturer and staff member at the University of Texas at Austin, was scheduled to give a talk entitled “A Queer Path to Leadership: Finding a Mentor to Help You Succeed in Higher Education.” It was part of a lecture series at the university for first-year students sponsored by the undergraduate college. Schilt’s talk would have focused on navigating college and developing a support network.

But the undergraduate college pulled Schilt’s planned lecture at the last minute, replacing her with another speaker without public explanation. Upon questioning, administrators stated that UT Austin’s legal team had urged them not to permit the lecture because it risked violating Senate Bill (SB) 17, the anti-DEI law which went into effect in January.

Greg Lukianoff and Sean Stevens
The Eternally Radical Idea

Excerpt: Last week we demonstrated that deplatforming attempts involving students have exploded over the past decade, supporting one aspect of Sean and Jonathan Haidt’s “new dynamic” hypothesis — which states that college students have become more hostile toward free speech over the past decade than in previous generations.

But Sean and Haidt’s hypothesis was also about how students would increasingly target conservative expression for deplatforming, and a deep dive into FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database indicates that it’s true: Students did in fact target conservative expression more often over the past decade than they did in the preceding 16 years.

Ben Raab and Benjamin Hernandez
Yale Daily News

Excerpt: Over 100 faculty members now have their signatures displayed on a website for a new faculty group, Faculty for Yale, which “insist[s] on the primacy of teaching, learning and research as distinct from advocacy and activism.”

Among other measures, the group calls for “a thorough reassessment of administrative encroachment” and the promotion of diverse viewpoints. The group also calls for a more thorough description of free expression guidelines in the Faculty Handbook; Yale’s current guidelines are based on its 1974 Woodward Report. The group also wants Yale to implement a set of guidelines regarding donor influence, which were first put forth by the Gift Policy Review Committee in 2022.

Francesca Block, Princeton 2022, PFS Board Member
The Free Press

Excerpt: Free speech is the bedrock of a free society—essential for scientific progress, artistic expression, social justice, and democracy. But we live in an era in which free speech is seen as political. Where the very notion of hearing ideas from people you disagree with is viewed as suspect or even morally wrong.

Our campus culture today says it’s okay to shut down viewpoints you disagree with. There are the obvious ways this happens—through campaigns to disinvite controversial figures from campus or shout them down once they are there. But there are more subtle ways, too. There’s the unspoken, but very real, pressure in class to not question the information being presented, or to shy away from speaking up and offering a different perspective out of fear of being judged harshly by your peers.

UNC Alumni Free Speech Alliance

Excerpt: Join UNC AFSA, the Student Free Speech Alliance, Heterodox Heels and the UNC Program for Public Discourse for an enlightening evening with renowned social psychologist and professor Jonathan Haidt. Dr. Haidt will discuss dynamics that are reshaping university campuses, explore America's dwindling trust in higher education, and offer suggestions as to what academic institutions must do to regain society’s confidence.

Joe Killian
NC Newsline

Excerpt: The climate for free speech and expression on North Carolina’s college campuses is good and improving, according to a new report from the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The group, whose work is frequently cited by campus trustees and members of the UNC System Board of Governors, gave 14 of the system’s 16 university campuses its highest “green light” rating in its new report.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is True

Excerpt: At many colleges, submitting SAT test scores for admissions has been eliminated or made optional—often during the pandemic—under the assumption that giving scores would disadvantage racial minorities, who don’t test as well as do white or Asian applicants. This was a way to achieve diversity—a way to enact “holistic admissions.”  Even though SAT scores were good predictors not only of college achievement, and of later-life success, measures of potential achievement were considered less important than indices of diversity.

Now the highly-rated Dartmouth College in New Hampshire has done a similar study, found the same correlative predication as did the UC system, and has reinstated the requirement for SATs, something it made optional during the pandemic.

Heterodox Academy Podcast
John Tomasi & Steven Pinker

Excerpt: Are our higher education institutions still nurturing true
intellectual diversity? Our guest today is Steven Pinker, a cognitive
scientist at Harvard, and today, we'll be exploring the growing
concerns within higher ed that institutions are turning into echo
chambers, stifling dissent and censoring certain perspectives.

In this thought-provoking episode, we'll be discovering the challenges
to academic freedom in the era of cancel culture. We'll explore how
questioning a consensus can now come at a cost, impacting the pursuit
of truth within academic institutions. We'll also uncover the story of
the Council for Academic Freedom at Harvard, which was formed to
combat these challenges.

Joshua T. Katz
AEI

Excerpt: Do we really need another opinion piece about the resignation of Claudine Gay? The Harvard train wreck has transfixed the nation since early October, and even as the punditry piles up, the gulf seems to be widening between those who excoriate Gay, the Harvard Corporation, and the university generally and those who praise Gay as a martyr and defend the practices of the institution she led.

Few people, however, have said nice things about the Harvard Corporation, and one lesson to learn from the New York Times exposé into this secretive body’s quick, behind-the-scenes shift from expressing confidence in Gay’s presidency to pushing her out is that the public pressure of punditry can work.

Harry R. Lewis
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: Unapologetic antisemitism — whether the incidents are few or numerous — is a college phenomenon because of what we teach, and how our teachings are exploited by malign actors.

When complex social and political histories are oversimplified in our teachings as Manichaean struggles — between oppressed people and their oppressors, the powerless and the powerful, the just and the wicked — a veneer of academic respectability is applied to the ugly old stereotype of Jews as evil but deviously successful people. While Harvard cannot stop the abuse of our teaching, we, the Harvard faculty, can recognize and work to mitigate these impacts.

James Hankins
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Claudine Gay, the president of my university, is under attack for academic dishonesty. She is charged with several instances of plagiarism, in her dissertation and other published work, in addition to data falsification. As of this writing it seems not unlikely that she may be fired or asked to resign.

What concerns me is that the public discussion so far hasn’t shown a sufficient appreciation of how serious academic honesty is in research institutions. Some of Ms. Gay’s supporters treat the allegations as trivial, dismissing them as the product of right-wing scandal-mongering. That is a historically uninformed view. Research universities, and the wider modern project of improving human life through research and scholarship, depend on academic honesty.

Heather Mac Donald
City Journal

Excerpt: The pro-Hamas uprising that broke out across American universities after October 7 roused once-somnolent alumni and donors. That awakening has now produced a new university charter, called a “Vision for a New Future of the University of Pennsylvania,” drafted by Penn professors. The charter’s authors, along with Penn’s rebel donors, hope to make agreement with the new constitution a requirement for Penn’s new president.

Penn 2.0 overcomes in one stroke a weakness bedeviling a central strategy of campus reform. Those seeking to create new universities face the challenge that no new institution can offer the prize that a legacy university confers: status and bragging rights. It is prestige that drives the ever-more frenzied torrent of college applications, rather than any promise of knowledge. The beauty of the Penn 2.0 plan is that it re-founds Penn on a new footing, while maintaining Penn’s prestige-granting power.

Heather Mac Donald
City Journal

Excerpt: Liz Magill was forced to resign Saturday as president of the University of Pennsylvania—by all indications because, at a congressional hearing, she could not bring herself to declare that calls for the genocide of Jews are punishable speech. She would more justly have lost her job for being a bald-faced hypocrite when it comes to campus free expression. The future of higher education depends on which of these motives governs such decisions in the future.

The presidents’ refusal to declare hypothetical calls for the genocide of Jews punishable conduct has been portrayed as the greatest scandal of the hearing. It was not. The real scandal was the presidents’ duplicity in citing a “commitment to free expression” as the reason why they needed to give “wide berth to . . . views that are objectionable,” as Gay put it.

Steven Lubet
The Hill

Excerpt: The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) quite rightly calls itself the “most prominent guardian of academic freedom” for faculty and students in the U.S. In a recent statement on the Israel-Hamas war, however, titled “Polarizing Times Demand Robust Academic Freedom” the AAUP displayed a distressing anti-Israel bias that sadly undermines its commitment to even-handed protection of free expression.

Ilya Shapiro
The Free Press

Excerpt: Even antisemites have the right to free speech, as Nadine Strossen and Pamela Paresky correctly wrote in The Free Press. Since the Hamas massacre of October 7, they have been taking full advantage of that right. Especially on college campuses.

I would put my free speech bona fides up against anyone. I’m also a lawyer and sometime law professor who recognizes that not all speech-related questions can be resolved by invoking the words First Amendment. Much of what we’ve witnessed on campuses over the past few weeks is not, in fact, speech, but conduct designed specifically to harass, intimidate, and terrorize Jews.

Jesse Wegman
New York Times
 
Excerpt: It was a relief to learn of the arrest last week of a 21-year-old Cornell University student for threatening to rape and murder Jews on campus in reaction to the Israel-Hamas war. It was also an easy case: Violent threats against specific people are illegal, and they are dealt with by the justice system, not school administrators.

Glenn Loury
Substack

Excerpt: Last month, I had the honor of delivering the keynote address at the MIT Free Speech Alliance’s first conference. I received my doctorate in economics from MIT back in the 1970s. At the time, it was probably the best economics department on the planet. An atmosphere of unfettered inquiry was key to MIT economics’ success in those days, just as it is key to the survival and thriving of any ambitious intellectual enterprise. There were no questions you couldn’t ask, and the legitimacy of your answers to those questions depended solely on their ability to withstand the scrutiny of your teachers and peers.

That is as it should be. But as we’ve seen, the spirit of free inquiry is now too often hampered by the censorious impulses of campus culture warriors in the student body, faculty, and administration.

Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, Andrew Lowenthal, and Leighton Woodhouse
Public, Substack

Excerpt: In March of this year, two of us, Matt and Michael, testified to Congress about the existence of a Censorship Industrial Complex comprised of government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and Big Tech companies working together to suppress disfavored views and disfavored people.

Now, a group of 138 scholars, public intellectuals, and journalists from across the political spectrum have issued a strong call warning the public of the Censorship Industrial Complex and urging governments to dismantle it in the name of the “first liberty,” freedom of speech. It’s called The Westminster Declaration.

Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Last February, reporters on the Ashland University student newspaper set out to cover a town hall on campus. Seven months later, their adviser was dismissed and the administration began seeking increased oversight of the paper, The Collegian. How did the relationship between the student journalists and Ashland administrators fall apart so fast?

Michael B. Poliakoff (President of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni)
New York Times Letter to the Editor

Excerpt: Editors Note: This article is a collection of letters to the editor. Poliakoff’s letter is the last of the seven included.

This article prompts the hypothetical question whether a latter-day Albert Einstein would have a chance of employment at Berkeley or a number of other University of California campuses.

When asked about his commitment to diversity, that world-class physicist would likely give a response along the lines of these words he once said: “I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.” That fails, on Berkeley’s scoring rubric, to indicate sufficient alignment with the ideology the college expects all faculty to share. And that would be the end of the applicant’s candidacy in almost every instance.

Frederick M. Hess
Forbes

Excerpt: It’s been a long few years when it comes to free inquiry on campus, with tales of silenced speakers and stymied discourse having become all too familiar. Amidst plunging trust in higher education, it’s safe to say that all this has had real costs. Last week, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and College Pulse jointly issued their annual report on the state of free speech in higher education. They surveyed more than 55,000 students across 248 colleges.

The numbers are troubling but not as hopeless as more hysterical accounts suggest.

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley's Blog

Excerpt: Below is my column in The Messenger on the new ranking of colleges and universities on the protection of free speech on campuses. There are few surprises on the list with many of the most elite universities filling out the bottom of ranking as the most hostile to free expression. Harvard now holds the ignoble distinction of being the most anti-free speech university in the country. For full disclosure, George Washington University (where I teach) was again ranked “below average” on free speech, coming in at 185 out of 248.

Zack Beauchamp
Vox

 Excerpt: Rufo claims that the American system as we know it has been overthrown, subtly and quietly replaced by “a new ideological regime that is inspired by ... critical theories and administered through the capture of the bureaucracy.” Rufo’s “counterrevolution” is aimed at reversing this process; taking America back, starting with Florida’s universities.

Radicals haven’t taken over mainstream America; they’ve been taken over by it. It follows, then, that Rufo’s “counterrevolution” is not countering much of anything. His war on American institutions is not a defensive action against an ascendant post-Marxist left; it is instead an act of aggression against the liberal ideals he occasionally claims to be defending.

Lisa Tolin
PEN America

Excerpt: In her 30 years as a school librarian, Jill Blake fielded the occasional request from parents who didn’t want their child to read a book – Harry Potter, for example. Then in 2022, the floodgates opened, and challenges started rolling in.

A new law in Virginia, where she is a school librarian, required schools to list their “sexually explicit” instructional materials. Shakespeare made the list. The district received a dozen book challenges; she noticed that all of the challenged books were from a Moms for Liberty list.  “(The law) just makes teachers afraid in general. I have been called a porn peddler in an open meeting,” Blake told PEN America. “One person on Facebook has said I should be stoned to death.”

Scott Yenor and Anna Miller
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s antiwoke education agenda has drawn national attention, but equally important and far less noticed is how Mr. DeSantis advanced new educational standards. A pedagogical revolution is afoot in the Sunshine State, which could serve as a blueprint for states across the country.

Florida’s education reformers understand that antiwoke rhetoric alone is insufficient. A vision for education excellence must displace underperforming K-12 institutions. Florida has passed universal education savings accounts, which give families access to public per pupil funds for tuition to private or classical schools, school supplies and home-schooling aid.

Eugene Volokh
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

 Excerpt: "The professor, an expert on the opioids crisis, was placed on paid administrative leave and investigated, raising questions about the extent of political interference in higher education, particularly in health-related matters."

 So reports the Texas Tribune (Kate McGee & James Barragan); though the leave was lifted after two weeks, this strikes me as quite troubling.

Jonathan Feingold, Angela Harris & Athena Mutua
Newsweek

Excerpt: Last March, Stanford Law students protested when a Trump-appointed judge spoke on campus. An administrator intervened, defending her students' and the judge's right to speak. Her actions nonetheless triggered a rightwing campaign demanding her ouster, and last week, Stanford announced the administrator will not return. To borrow from modern parlance, she was "cancelled."

The story is one of many examples, a reoccurring dynamic in which students speak, then administrators respond (or don't), followed by pundits decrying "cancel culture" and a "free speech crisis." These pundits are in fact right, though not in the way they think. Free speech is under attack. But the students aren't to blame.

Emma Camp
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: According to a new survey, a majority of college students believe that professors who say something "offensive" should be reported to the university.

The survey, from researchers at North Dakota State University, found that 74 percent of students overall supported reporting professors for offensive statements. While a majority of students from all political persuasions agreed with reporting professors, a higher percentage of liberal students were in favor; 81 percent of liberal students supported reporting professors, while only 53 percent of conservative students supported it.

Jennifer Ruth
Academe Blog

Excerpt: [Professor Kathleen] McElroy is a veteran journalist, with two decades of experience at the New York Times covering obituaries, sports, and other topics before she left to get a PhD and then join UT–Austin’s journalism program, soon serving a term as its director. So when Texas A&M announced that they were recruiting McElroy to relaunch their long-dormant journalism program, they did so with understandable fanfare.

But this is Texas and McElroy is a Black woman who believes broadly in the value of diversity. These factors do not undermine her fitness to run a journalism program, of course, and some might even believe they enhance her fitness, but these factors were, nonetheless, apparently enough to tank the appointment.

María Luisa Paúl
Washington Post

Excerpt: A teacher was fired Wednesday by the Waukesha, Wis., school board after she publicly criticized school administrators’ decision to prohibit her first-grade class from singing a song about rainbows earlier this year.

Judith Friedlander
Persuasion

Excerpt: This is hardly the first time in the history of American higher education that elected politicians have threatened the autonomy of academic institutions and the future of academic freedom. Nor is it the first time that opposing factions on college and university campuses have battled over the meaning of academic freedom.

By Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman
The Washington Post

Excerpt: At first glance, the plight of Katherine Rinderle, a fifth-grade teacher in Georgia, might seem confusing. Rinderle faces likely termination by the Cobb County School District for reading aloud a children’s book that touches on gender identity. Yet she is charged in part with violating policy related to a state law banning “divisive concepts” about race, not gender.

By Greg Sargent
The Washington Post

Excerpt: By now, it’s well understood that the right’s efforts to restrict classroom discussion are all about marginalizing LGBTQ people under the guise of protecting children. But they also harbor a less obvious aim: to convince parents that kids are under threat in the first place. That mild-mannered teacher over there? She just might be scheming to pervert, indoctrinate and snatch away childhood innocence.

By Ronald Brownstein
The Atlantic

Excerpt: Across multiple fronts, Democrats and their allies are stiffening their resistance to a surge of Republican-led book bans.

By Jordan Howell
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Excerpt: An Illinois teacher is out of a job after a group of parents accused her of “child grooming” for including an LGBTQ-themed book in a reading assignment for eighth grade students in the town of Heyworth. The book is one of nearly a hundred of all different subjects and themes provided to students back in March as part of the assignment, and Heyworth Chief of Police Michael Geriets seized dozens of books during his sprawling, weeks-long investigation.

By Zach Greenburg
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Excerpt: Cold winters, hot wings, and “a place where you’ll make a real difference.” That’s what University at Buffalo offers its students — but not those who want to pursue their passions by participating in certain student groups. A new student government policy threatens to derecognize dozens of student groups solely for their affiliation with outside organizations. FIRE calls on the university to walk back this egregious violation of students’ First Amendment right to freedom of association.

By John Jiang
American Spectator

Excerpt: Affirmative action in higher education is set to face the judgment of the Supreme Court. The moment is quietly exhilarating. This is an injustice that has been hoisted upon so many, for so long, and with the patronage of so many powerful institutions that it seemed perhaps too big and too heavy to ever remove. Yet the same was true of Roe v. Wade, and now Roe v. Wade is gone.