Tal Fortgang of the Manhattan Institute
Fox News
Excerpt: With the Trump administration threatening to cut off its federal support, Harvard recently released its long-awaited internal report detailing rampant national-origin discrimination on campus – especially against Israelis and Jews. The administration claims that Harvard is rotten to the bone, hollowed out by ideological one-sidedness and an emphasis on social-justice activism rather than genuine inquiry. The university has countered that while it is working on rooting out discrimination, the administration has "overreached" to target the substance of what is studied and taught.
Nick Gillespie
Reason
Excerpt: Today's guest is Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker and Reason's Nick Gillespie discuss recent shifts at Harvard toward greater institutional neutrality and free speech, while warning that threats to academic freedom now come from both internal ideologies and external political forces—including pressure from the federal government under President Donald Trump.
John Tomasi
Free the Inquiry, Heterodox Academy
Excerpt: In a rare and admirable act of institutional defiance, Harvard University has rejected demands from the Trump administration that would have compromised its autonomy, chilled academic freedom, and upended core principles of academia. The government’s letter to Harvard — citing a broad civil rights investigation — demanded detailed records, ideological audits, and structural changes that amount to an effort at direct political control. Harvard was right to say no.
The administration’s demands are a serious threat to academic freedom. Yet Harvard's resistance will ring hollow unless it pairs its bold defense of independence with an equally honest reckoning about the internal failures that made it vulnerable to such scrutiny in the first place.
Ilya Somin
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine
Excerpt: In a previous post, I urged universities to band together to file a lawsuit challenging Donald Trump's policy of speech-based deportation of foreign students and academics. So far, I have had little, if any, success in persuading schools to do so. Many individual academics have expressed support for the idea (originated by the faculty of the Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy), but no university administrations have acted on it.
Still, I am happy to see that 86 colleges and higher education associations filed an amicus brief in a case challenging the deportations filed by the the Knight First Amendment Institute on behalf of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).
Megan O'Rourke
New York Times
Excerpt: The rumors had been building for months: The Trump administration was coming for the universities. In the weeks after the president issued his first executive orders in January, the effects rippled through my academic world: A Rutgers conference on H.B.C.U.s was canceled; graduate students on visas asked a professor I know if it was safe for them to travel; a colleague at a public university texted about an undergraduate crying in his office, worried about the job landscape.
Conservatives have been trying to reshape the American university since the federal government began funding it in earnest in the mid-20th century. But now the Trump administration appears prepared to destroy it.
David French
New York Times
Excerpt: Columbia University is now the epicenter of the American culture war. The Trump administration is targeting a former Columbia student — and the university itself — as a test case for its new authoritarian regime.
The story of Columbia isn’t simply about Mahmoud Khalil, a former graduate student in international affairs there who was one of the leaders of the pro-Palestinian protests that burst into view almost immediately after the Hamas terror attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. But when federal immigration officials showed up at his apartment building last weekend and whisked him away to a facility in Louisiana to begin deportation proceedings, they brought the malice and incompetence of the Trump administration into stark relief.
FIRE
Excerpt: It’s been three days since the government arrested and detained Mahmoud Khalil for deportation. This afternoon, the administration finally stated the basis for its actions. Its explanation threatens the free speech of millions of people.
Yesterday, an administration official told The Free Press, “The allegation here is not that [Khalil] was breaking the law.” This was confirmed today by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who announced Khalil is being targeted under a law that she characterized as allowing the secretary of state to personally deem individuals “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America.”
Nathan Heller
New Yorker
Excerpt: There would be debate about who struck the match that lit the fuse that spiraled around campus, but the sequence of events was plain enough to everyone who saw it burn. On October 9, 2023, two days after Hamas-led fighters from Gaza invaded Israel, killing twelve hundred people and taking more than two hundred hostages, Claudine Gay, the new president of Harvard University, exchanged e-mails with a small group of colleagues to draft a suitable response. Should they call the attacks “violent”? (Too charged, they decided.) Should they denounce a letter, signed by more than thirty student groups, which called Israel “the only one to blame”? The matter seemed delicate, and the administrators took time to work over their language.
Santiago A. Saldivar
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: In the face of brazen governmental recommendations, Harvard must uphold the value of diversity.
About two weeks ago, the Department of Education released a Dear Colleague letter declaring all race-based decision-making by federally funded institutions illegal under the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision outlawing race-conscious admissions. Last year, after the long-overdue release of the class of 2028 admissions data revealed a four percent drop in Black enrollment, I called on Harvard to lay out its plans for increasing racial diversity in admissions. In light of the Trump administration’s attacks on race-conscious practices, that call to action remains more important than ever.
Tanya J. Vidhun
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: Harvard Vice Provost for Advances in Learning Bharat N. Anand said the University is encouraging teachers to broach controversial subjects in classrooms at a Harvard Graduate School of Education virtual event on Thursday.
The University has been widely criticized in recent years for both speech policies and a perceived lack of ideological diversity. After a year of exceptional protest activity, Harvard officials have launched a series of initiatives aimed at improving dialogue and understanding the campus speech climate and academic freedom.
Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True
Excerpt: As you know the University of Chicago was the first higher-ed school in America to adopt a position of institutional neutrality. This was done in 1967, with the principle embodied in our Kalven Report. Kalven prohibits the University or its units, including departments and centers, from taking official stands on political, moral, and ideological issues—save in those cases where the issue is one that could affect the mission of our University. According to FIRE, which approves of this position of institutional neutrality, some 29 other colleges or boards of education have joined Chicago in adopting one.
Deviations from the position of neutrality are rare, but this morning we learned that our President, Paul Alivisatos, has declared official University opposition to the Trump’s administration of slashing “indirect costs” on NIH grants.
Stephanie Saul
New York Times
Excerpt: Columbia University and one of its longtime law professors, Katherine Franke, have severed ties after an investigation stemming from her advocacy on behalf of pro-Palestinian students.
It was the latest fallout from student and faculty activism related to the Gaza War on a major university campus. Ms. Franke, a tenured professor known primarily for her work as founder and director of Columbia’s Center for Gender & Sexuality Law, had been an advocate for pro-Palestinian students as protests erupted on the campus last school year.
John Aubrey Douglass
University World News
Excerpt: Over the past five years or so, there has been a significant increase in faculty votes of no confidence in their university and college presidents in the United States. These votes are an indicator of an evolving and increasingly challenging environment for university and college leadership, as well as evidence of a decline in shared governance – an environment that will likely become even more complex with Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
by David Jesse, Chronicle of Higher Education
The tales are swapped in conference-hotel hallways or over quiet dinners: controversial speakers attracting rowdy protests, professors drawing fire for an offhand comment during a lecture and then posted online, legislators trying to codify what can and can’t be taught in classrooms.
We have joined with 50 colleagues to create a new Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. It’s not about us. For many years we have each expressed strong and often unorthodox opinions with complete freedom and with the support, indeed warm encouragement, of our colleagues, deans, and presidents.
Amy Wax, a law professor, has said publicly that “on average, Blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites,” ...
Abigail Saguy, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles, was a little bit nervous to teach a course called “Sociology of Gender” again. She’d last done so in 2019, and found the atmosphere increasingly combative, saying student activists in her course had attempted to “police” her readings and word choice. So in 2024 she tried something new: She got students to debate each other virtually.
In 2023, FIRE raised the following question: What’s going on in Florida? In light of recent affronts to academic freedom in the Sunshine State, we regret to raise this question once again.
A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education describes the current trend on college campuses of starting “civil dialogue” programs. These programs are designed to help students engage with diverse ideas in more constructive ways. This effort is commendable but the question is: Will these programs work?
Even as campuses embrace civil dialogue, there is a danger that some university leaders are quietly redefining “open inquiry.” And they are doing so in a way that makes campus dialogue more narrow and less intellectually demanding than it ought to be.
Emma Whitford
Inside Higher Ed
The University of Oklahoma put a lecturer on administrative leave last week for allegedly exercising “viewpoint discrimination” five days after a different instructor was placed on leave for alleged religious discrimination.
Kelli Alvarez, an assistant teaching professor focused on race and ethnicity in literature and film, allegedly encouraged students to miss her English composition class to attend a protest in support of Mel Curth, a graduate teaching assistant in the psychology department who was removed from teaching after a student filed a religious discrimination complaint against her. Alvarez said she would excuse the absences of students who attended the protest. But according to university officials, she did not extend the same offer to students who intended to miss class that day to “express a counter-viewpoint.”
Rose Horowitch
The Atlantic
Administering an exam used to be straightforward: All a college professor needed was an open room and a stack of blue books. At many American universities, this is no longer true. Professors now struggle to accommodate the many students with an official disability designation, which may entitle them to extra time, a distraction-free environment, or the use of otherwise-prohibited technology.
No one should be kept from taking a class, for example, because they are physically unable to enter the building where it’s taught. Over the past decade and a half, however, the share of students at selective universities who qualify for accommodations—often, extra time on tests—has grown at a breathtaking pace.
Samuel J. Abrams
FIRE
The recent controversies surrounding Charlie Kirk — and the extraordinary reaction that followed his campus appearances and commentary — offer a revealing window into the fragile state of free expression in contemporary America.
Two recent New York Times opinion pieces examining the backlash were right to highlight how quickly public discourse has hardened into a zero-sum contest in which speech itself becomes grounds for professional punishment, social ostracism, and institutional retaliation. But the deeper lesson is even more unsettling: Free speech is increasingly treated not as a constitutional principle, but as a conditional privilege — one that applies only when speech is politically comfortable.
Catie Ratliff
C-ville.com
Excerpt: WUVA, the sole student broadcast news and culture outlet at the university published an exclusive interview with interim President Paul Mahoney on October 12. Fourth-year Sophia Bangura, one of the student journalists who worked on the project, was terminated from the organization three days later for “insubordination” for asking follow up questions during the interview and declining to apologize to the interim president’s office.
Nika Schindler and Nikoloz Inashvili
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Most graduate program cohort sizes will see a “modest reduction” in the 2025 admission cycle, according to University spokesperson Jennifer Morrill.
Morrill attributed these changes to uncertainty about the University’s budget and research funding. All departments and academic units have been directed to cut 5 to 10 percent of their budgets this academic year, and the University has been rocked by hundreds of millions of federal cuts to its research funding (although about half of those grants have been restored).
Ian Bogost
The Atlantic
Excerpt: Harvard is worried about going soft. Specifically, about grade inflation, the name for giving ever higher marks to ever more students. According to an “Update on Grading and Workload” from the school’s office of undergraduate education, released last week to faculty and students, this trend has reached a catastrophic threshold. Twenty years ago, 25 percent of the grades given to Harvard undergrads were A’s. Now it’s more than 60 percent.
As a professor at another elite private university, who has been teaching undergraduates for more than 20 years, I have surely been guilty of inflating grades. The spectacle unfolding at Harvard is more visible, but the condition that underlies it is widespread and chronic.
Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder
Banished, Substack
Excerpt: Amna & Jeff talk to Jon Zimmerman about why some profs are afraid to speak their minds.
Chapin Lenthall-Cleary
The Eternally Radical Idea
Excerpt: Suppose you’re a controversial left-wing speaker. Who do you think would be more likely to let you voice your opinions on campus: a slightly conservative man or a democratic socialist woman?
Jasper Ward
Reuters
Excerpt: The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday it had revoked the visas of six foreigners over social media comments made about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
The announcement of the revocations came as U.S. President Donald Trump posthumously awarded Kirk with the presidential medal of freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S., on what would have been Kirk's 32nd birthday. "The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans," the department said on X.
Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Citing multiple concerns, Brown University on Wednesday rejected an invitation to join the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that the Trump administration proposed.
Following MIT’s rejection, the Trump administration said the compact was open to all colleges. But of the original nine invitees, there are no takers so far, though officials at the University of Texas system have indicated they view the proposal favorably. The system’s flagship in Austin was part of the nine.
Michael Regnier
Free The Inquiry, Heterodox Academy
Excerpt: More than a week after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the shock waves are still rolling through higher education. Kirk’s murder, on a college campus, in the act of open debate, was committed by a killer who reportedly believed that “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Although the assassin was a college dropout, his apparent logic was very familiar on campus: some ideas are just “hate,” and the normal rules don’t apply.
But those of us doing campus programming should look in the mirror before we mention dialogue programs in the same breath as Charlie Kirk. As Redstone points out, Kirk “was pro-life, he supported the police, he questioned systemic racism, and he believed there were only two genders.” These are all squarely mainstream, and in some cases majority, viewpoints in the United States, yet scandalous on many campuses.
Emma Whitford
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: At least eight faculty and staff members have been fired or suspended so far for comments they made in response to the death of Turning Point USA founder and conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk, who was shot and killed Wednesday during an event at Utah Valley University.
Charlie Sykes and Sarah McLaughlin
To the Contrary Podcast, Substack
Excerpt: On today’s “To the Contrary” Podcast, I’m joined by Sarah McLaughlin, senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, about her new book Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech.
Jonathan Zimmerman
Washington Monthly
Excerpt: We’ve got this, say some colleges and universities. Yes, we’re cutting deals with Donald Trump’s administration. But we are also preserving our core value: academic freedom. We’ll be OK.
That’s what Columbia University declared last month, when it agreed to pay the administration $200 million for allegedly failing to protect students from antisemitic harassment. And it’s what Harvard said last week, when it canceled a journal’s special issue devoted to education in Palestine. Don’t believe them. The Harvard episode is a textbook case of censorship, brought to you by those who proclaim fealty to academic freedom. And once we have turned our back on that principle, we won’t have any reason to exist.
