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The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Political speakers on campus often face protests from activists who say their presence makes students feel “unsafe.” No such worry for United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who is going on something of an American campus grand tour with her anti-Israel message.

Elyse C. Goncalves and Akshaya Ravi
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: Harvard Medical School canceled a planned Jan. 21 lecture on wartime healthcare and a subsequent panel with patients from Gaza receiving care in Boston in response to objections that students would hear from Gazans impacted by the war and not also Israelis.

Course instructors and students were notified Tuesday morning that the events — scheduled for that evening — would not be held. Medical School Dean George Q. Daley ’82 wrote in a Wednesday email sent to first-year students and obtained by The Crimson that his office began receiving complaints from students and faculty within days after the session was first publicized last week.

Christopher Bao and Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Following the first day of classes, pro-Palestine organizers held the first protest of the academic year. Around 150 demonstrators attended, touring many of the major sites of Princeton’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” from the spring semester, starting the march on McCosh Courtyard before moving to the front of Clio Hall and Nassau Hall.

The protest comes amid a newly launched University website on protests addressing frequently asked questions regarding time, place, and manner restrictions, including tightened protest regulations. The newest rules introduced were a recurring topic of the protest, although administrators have asserted that the website introduces no significant changes to the University’s rules.

Michelle N. Amponsah, Joyce E. Kim, and Tilly R. Robinson
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: The Harvard College Administrative Board reversed its decision to suspend five students for participating in the pro-Palestine encampment earlier this year after the Faculty Council criticized its handling of the cases.

The College informed students on Tuesday of their updated disciplinary charges, which saw the suspensions downgraded to probations of varying lengths, according to a person familiar with the decisions who was granted anonymity to discuss disciplinary matters.

Isabel Keane
New York Post

Excerpt: An anti-Israel protester at Princeton University sounded off about how she was “starving” during a self-imposed hunger strike and accused the prestigious university of purposefully “physically weakening” students.

Julie Bonette
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: Princeton University public safety has increased patrols on campus after inflammatory anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian graffiti was painted at three spots in late December, according to a Princeton Police Department (PPD) incident report, the University, and a Department of Public Safety (DPS) log. No suspect has been detained.

VP Rochelle Calhoun, The Office of the Vice President for Campus Life

Excerpt:  Dear students,

I write to update you about the brief takeover of Clio Hall yesterday afternoon.

This incident represented an escalation by protestors into unlawful behavior that created a dangerous situation for protestors, University staff, and law enforcement. As protestors entered Clio Hall, our staff found themselves surrounded, yelled at, threatened, and ultimately ordered out of the building.

Sean Stevens and Greg Lukianoff 
The Eternally Radical Idea 

Excerpt: We’ve both written a lot about how hostility to freedom of expression on college and university campuses has grown and intensified over the past decade. One thing that tends to go unacknowledged is that, during this time period, a tacit unholy alliance between administrators and students has emerged. In this piece, we’ll explore how this alliance has contributed to a record-breaking surge in deplatforming attempts on American college and university campuses over the past two years.

Sean Stevens
The Eternally Radical Idea

Excerpt: This past spring, FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings survey was in the field when the encampment protests began. This gives FIRE the ability to analyze how student attitudes about free speech changed in response to the encampment protests. FIRE also conducted a separate survey on the encampment protests at 30 of the 251 ranked schools during the months of May and June.

The data from these two surveys offer incredible insight into how students reacted to the encampment protests. Among other things, they reveal that administrators on many campuses across the country have lost the trust of their students when it comes to free speech on campus.

Carlett Spike, Peter Barzilai s'97
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: The 13 Princeton students who were arrested during the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus are unlikely to face penalties greater than probation, the University said in a statement Monday night.

The students will be able to participate in end-of-year activities and graduation, according to the statement. Hours earlier, faculty members voted 154-136 in favor of granting amnesty to the students at a special meeting held at Richardson Auditorium.

Alice Dreger 
Free the Inquiry, Heterodox Academy 

Excerpt: Two questions – what counts as activism in academia and what (if anything) should be done about it – formed the core of our lively webinar last Wednesday as I spoke with the University of Wyoming’s Martha McCaughey and the University of Chicago’s Tom Ginsburg and took questions from Heterodox Academy members.

Bill Hewitt ‘74
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: The Board of Trustees’ recent decision regarding the John Witherspoon statue merits both praise and criticism. Their refusal to remove or alter the statue is commendable. Dedicated by predecessor trustees in 2001 to honor Witherspoon, the statue should remain unchanged, regardless of artistic considerations. Recent scholarship has provided a more favorable historical understanding of Witherspoon’s relationship with slavery than was available in 2001, further justifying this decision.

Regrettably, the Trustees erred in delegating the fate of the Witherspoon statue to the Campus Art Steering Committee. Any alteration of the statue would constitute a damnatio memoriae of Witherspoon. An ominous portent in the Committee on Naming report is the troubling conflation of judgments about Witherspoon’s historical relation to slavery with those about the statue’s artistic merit.

Graham Piro
FIRE

Excerpt: A University of Wisconsin-La Crosse faculty committee formally recommended last week that professor Joe Gow lose his tenured faculty role for the on-his-own-time activity of making pornographic videos with his wife and writing books about the experience. The recommendation, which undermines what tenure is meant to protect — including faculty members’ right to express themselves outside the classroom — clashes with the First Amendment and threatens the rights of all UW faculty.

UW already fired Gow from his role as chancellor in December after discovering he made the videos. Under continued pressure from lawmakers and donors who wanted Gow gone from his faculty role, too, the faculty hearing committee unanimously recommended Gow’s dismissal in a decision publicized late Friday.

Julie Bonette
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: Ronen Shoval, a 2022-23 associate research scholar with the James Madison Program and lecturer in politics at Princeton, faced opposition from students, faculty, and locals while on campus due to his affiliations with a right-wing Israeli movement some have said has similarities with fascism.

Jacob Sullum 
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident who was the first target of President Donald Trump's crusade against foreign students he calls "terrorist sympathizers," could soon be released from custody thanks to a preliminary injunction that a federal judge in New Jersey granted this week. The reasoning behind that injunction underlines the chilling impact of Trump's attempt to treat speech he does not like as a deportable offense.

[U.S. District Judge Michael] Farbiarz stayed his injunction until 9:30 this morning to allow for a government appeal of his decision. That deadline came and went without an appeal. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official nevertheless told Khalil's lawyers "the government has no immediate plans to release him," The New York Times reports.

Schuyler Mitchell
The Intercept

Excerpt: New York University School of Law barred 31 pro-Palestine law school students from campus facilities and demanded that they sign away their right to protest in exchange for being allowed to return. If the students — deemed “personae non grata,” or PNG — don’t renounce their right to protest on campus, they will be unable to sit for final exams.

Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: After an unprecedented spring of pro-Palestinian protests on campuses across the United States, the fall semester has been comparatively quiet. The total number of protest actions declined by more than 64 percent, from 3,220 to 1,151, according to data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, a project by Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the University of Connecticut that collects data on protests.

Abigail Rabieh
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Just from reading the ‘Prince,’ especially last spring, it would seem that the Israel-Hamas war was the foremost issue on college students’ minds.  This was far from the case — when the ‘Prince’ polled students on their top concerns prior to the 2024 presidential election, few voters — for Trump or for Harris — identified the war as a priority. Why then, did the ‘Prince’ act as if last spring’s encampment deserved a huge amount of time, resources, and words to cover?

PEN America Press Release

Excerpt: PEN America today sharply criticized some Republican members of Congress for their recent actions scrutinizing academic decision-making at the Naval Academy, including insinuating that an invitation to scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat to deliver a lecture could violate federal law, which led to the event’s cancellation.

Anemona Hartocollis
New York Times

Excerpt: Maura Finkelstein, an anthropology professor at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, was an avid poster on social media. She called a fund-raiser for the Israeli war effort “students raising money for genocide,” and she frequently ended her posts with the words “Free Palestine.”

Julie Bonette
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: The two pro-Palestinian protesters who were arrested on Princeton’s campus for attempting to set up tents in the spring pleaded guilty and received suspended fines on Oct. 1, but Judge John McCarthy III ’69 denied the same deal to the first of the Clio Hall occupiers appearing in Princeton Municipal Court.

Olivia Sanchez
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: On Sept. 5, the University retracted its decision to ban protests on the front lawn of Nassau Hall. Cannon Green and the Prospect House grounds remain off-limits locations to protest.
According to University spokesperson Jennifer Morrill, the change was made because the walkways in front of Nassau Hall “have long been an approved protest site.”

Susan Svrluga
Washington Post

Excerpt: Columbia University is bracing for disruptive protests to resume as students arrive on campus this week, even as some hold out hope that the new administration will be able to broker peace. The days before the start of classes have been marked by restricted campus access, talk of giving campus security officers more clout and last-minute discussions about rules.

Many faculty, students and others have said they expect protests over the Israel-Gaza war to erupt with equal or greater intensity and predicted another chaotic year ahead.

Bret Stephens
New York Times

Excerpt: As college students return to campus, this is what I hope a university president might say to them about how their school intends to handle future protests.

Aaron Sibarium
Washington Free Beacon

Excerpt: Princeton University is on the verge of promoting a professor who participated in the occupation of a campus building that disrupted university operations and led to more than a dozen arrests, according to an email reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

The university has recommended that the classics scholar Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who along with 13 anti-Israel student protesters stormed Princeton’s historic Clio Hall in April, be promoted from associate to full professor, pending the approval of the university’s board of trustees. Peralta already has tenure, but the promotion would make him eligible for university leadership roles, including deanships.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: If you’re interested in the campus protests, you’ll want to read the whole thing, but I’ll just post one excerpt about the concessions that universities made to protestors. Some are serious, others performative, but all were made to stop encampments and protestors.  

Maybe I’m a grumpy old man, but I would stop illegal disruptions, like encampments, in their tracks using sanctions, and would be very loath to “bargain” with protestors who enacted illegal disruptions. (If protests are legal and student “demands” worth considering, it’s another matter. But institutional neutrality, at least a Chicago, would prohibit almost any concessions for protestors, as it did indeed.)

Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack

Excerpt: 1. The situation on campus for free speech has been bad for a long time.

If you’re tired of hearing it, believe me, I’m tired of saying it — but it needs to be said, over and over, until people finally get it and start doing something to fix it.

I’ve been fighting for free speech on campus since I started at FIRE back in 2001. Indeed, FIRE was founded in response to a growing free speech crisis in higher education, and that was in 1999! The situation was worse than I thought back when I started, and it has reached crisis level over the past decade.

Kathryn Palmer
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Six months after the Israel-Hamas war set off a new wave of campus activism in the United States, students are still protesting in full force. And at some institutions administrators are responding to student demonstrators—especially supporters of Palestinians—with increasingly harsh discipline.

In some ways, the actions of the students and the college administrators resemble campus climates during the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War and the apartheid era in South Africa, among other eras of social upheaval. What has changed, however, is the pressure politicians and donors now exert on college leaders to support a particular viewpoint.

Randall L. Kennedy, Princeton ‘77
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: Many legal protections are grouped under two related but distinct categories: civil liberties and civil rights. The former, which includes the right to freedom of speech, protects individuals from oppression. The latter prevents wrongful discrimination against groups based on race, religion, national origin, or other attributes.

I have watched with dismay as leading civil liberties organizations — such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and the National Coalition Against Censorship — have struggled to attract the support of young African Americans, at least in part because those organizations are seen as defending the rights of racists. This alienation between supporters of civil rights and civil liberties is harmful and avoidable. Reconciliation is essential and urgently needed.

Naomi Schaefer Riley
Commentary

Excerpt: In the wake of the October 7 massacre in Israel, University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill declined to comment because, she said, she didn’t think it was the role of college administrators to express an official view on controversial political issues. And she noted that “as a university, we also fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission.”

Thanks to some vocal donors who are closing their wallets and some employers who want nothing to do with these students once they graduate, those administrators who have spent the past decade making life uncomfortable or worse for those with views that do not conform to the latest campus fashion are getting a taste of their own medicine. This is not the resolution that Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott favor. In their new book, The Canceling of the American Mind, they worry that “for some on the right, a false sense has arisen that the way out of Cancel Culture is More Cancel Culture.”

Aaron Sibarium
Washington Free Beacon

Excerpt: Stanford Law School has parted ways with the diversity administrator who in March joined students in protesting a sitting federal judge, according to an email reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

By Amanda Nordstrom
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Excerpt: Graduation time used to be known as “disinvitation season” around FIRE’s offices, as we prepared for the yearly increase in demands by faculty members and students to revoke the invitations of guest speakers — often commencement and keynote speakers — because of something the speaker did, said, or believes.

Amanda Friedman
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Princeton University was publicly celebrating a professor’s selection for a prestigious award at the same time it was investigating her for her pro-Palestinian advocacy, the professor says.

On Tuesday, Princeton announced that Ruha Benjamin, a professor of African American Studies, was awarded an $800,000 “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Roughly 20 minutes after the university published its celebratory announcement, Benjamin shared on X that university officials had omitted her quotes about an investigation the college had opened into her involvement in a pro-Palestinian demonstration in April. The thread also includes the quotes she gave to the university.

Bill Hewitt
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: In her interview with Mother Jones, Ruha Benjamin, Princeton’s Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies and latest MacArthur Fellow, confirmed that the University is investigating her role in the April 29 Clio Hall protest. As someone who called upon the University to investigate faculty involvement in the Clio Hall takeover, I welcome this development.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Protests of a Turning Point USA event at the University of California, Berkeley, campus Monday sparked arrests and investigation announcements from top U.S. Department of Justice officials, who alleged “Antifa” involvement. The DOJ was already investigating the UC system over various allegations, and the Trump administration has demanded UCLA pay $1.2 billion and make other concessions.

“Antifa is an existential threat to our nation,” Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on X Tuesday. “The violent riots at UC Berkeley last night are under full investigation by the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force.”

Jennifer Schuessler and Vimal Patel
New York Times

Excerpt: The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an increasingly prominent free-speech organization, has long been known as a fierce opponent of campus political correctness. Since its founding in 1999, it has been celebrated for defending conservatives and other dissidents from the prevailing liberal culture at America’s universities.

Greg Lukianoff with Scott Galloway
Prof G Media 

Excerpt: Greg Lukianoff, a free speech advocate, first-amendment attorney, and president of FIRE, joins Scott to break down the rise of cancel culture and its chilling effect on free speech.  They discuss why social media supercharged censorship, how college campuses became ground zero for speech suppression, and why younger generations may be more fragile and less free.

Cynthia Torres
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Following the Clio Hall sit-in that ended in 13 student arrests, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 sent a campus-wide email stating that the University was “exploring offering students arrested for protest-related offenses the option to participate in a ‘restorative justice’ process.”

However, according to an email chain obtained by The Daily Princetonian, this process quickly collapsed.

John Mark Rozendaal
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: It was a beautiful, rainy morning in August. I began to play a soulful slow dance by J.S. Bach on a $200 cello in front of Citibank’s international headquarters. Shielded by rainbow colored umbrellas, I was encircled by 12 brave cellist protectors with linked arms, dozens of fellow climate activists, and scores of New York’s “finest” deployed in riot gear.

John Bitzen
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: With the start of the academic year, campuses across the nation are preparing for more protests over the Israel-Hamas conflict. As students return to campus, the underlying issues that ignited these demonstrations—misunderstandings and misapplications of free speech—remain unaddressed. These protests have revealed a pressing challenge for universities: upholding the principles of free speech amid modern political activism.university-sponsored on that date.

Jorge Reyes
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: As Gaza solidarity encampments sprung up across university campuses last spring, students faced severe institutional repercussions for their activism. At Princeton, at least two students had their diplomas withheld and 15 were arrested. Across the country, over 3,000 students were arrested for participation in Gaza solidarity protests.

For some, these consequences are disproportionately dire. Undocumented and international students run the risk of being deported if arrested and are limited in their ability to protest, especially with politicians like Donald Trump threatening to infringe on their freedom of assembly.

The Editorial Board

Wall Street Journal

Do government employees have First Amendment rights? Not according to a First Circuit Court of Appeals panel, which recently held that a public school teacher could be fired for criticizing progressive views on social media.