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Katherine Knott
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The Biden administration’s new rule overhauling Title IX, the federal gender-equity law, is on hold in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia after a federal judge issued an order temporarily blocking the regulations from taking effect in those states Aug. 1.

Chief Judge Danny Reeves of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, found that the final regulations, which clarify that Title IX prohibits discrimination based on sexual and gender identity, are inconsistent with the underlying Title IX statute, Congress’s intentions in passing the law, and the way it’s been regulated.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: A recent announcement from The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) tells us something we knew was coming: the Biden Administration is walking back the improvements in Title IX made by Betsy DeVos. (Yes, it was one of the few good things done under Trump.) The original rules, which bear on how colleges adjudicate sexual misconduct, were put in place by Obama, then rolled back and made more fair by DeVos, and now Biden’s reverting the law to the Obama standards, which are palpably unfair because they take away rights from the accused that are in place in real courts.

Alexandra Alter
The New York Times

Excerpt: After several years of rising book bans, censorship efforts continued to surge last year, reaching the highest levels ever recorded by the American Library Association. Last year, 4,240 individual titles were targeted for removal from libraries, up from 2,571 titles in 2022, according to a report released Thursday by the association.

Those figures likely fail to capture the full scale of book removals, as many go unreported. The American Library Association, which has tracked book bans for more than 20 years, compiles data from book challenges that library professionals reported to the group and information gathered from news reports.

George Will
Washington Post

Excerpt: Although the Supreme Court is frequently accused of improper “activism,” it is often guilty of passive dereliction of duty. It was last week, when it refused to correct the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit’s lackadaisical tolerance of the culture of enforced conformity on campuses.

Last week, the supposedly activist Supreme Court passively refused to hear Speech First’s appeal against the 4th Circuit’s passivity. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., vigorously dissented, saying that Virginia Tech’s regulating of speech “appears limitless in scope”: “From the moment a student enters the university until graduation, he is under the university’s surveillance.” On campus and off.

Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder
Banished, Substack

Excerpt: On January 25, 2024, American University banned all indoor protests in the name of “inclusivity.” AU’s Office of the President explained this and other policy changes in a remarkable open letter that reads like a parody of what we call DEI, Inc. The first paragraph alone invokes “belonging” three times and “community” four times.

AU’s maneuver here--deploying the language of inclusion to clamp down on free speech--is one that we’ve seen many colleges and universities make in response to campus controversies surrounding the Israel-Hamas war. It’s a worrying trend: If students can’t protest, colleges and universities will fail to achieve one of their core missions, which is to prepare students for citizenship.

Jennifer Kabbany
College Fix

Excerpt: A higher education watchdog group has filed a complaint with the organization that accredits Harvard University over campus leaders’ probe into plagiarism accusations against former President Claudine Gay.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni filed a 12-page complaint with the New England Commission of Higher Education that calls on the group to launch a probe into “Harvard’s apparent violation of its own established procedures in the investigation of the alleged plagiarism committed by Dr. Gay,” ACTA stated in a Jan. 12 news release.

Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Inbar is an eminent, influential, and highly cited researcher with a Ph.D. in social psychology from Cornell University. There is no question that he is qualified. Anyone worth their salt doing work on political polarization knows Inbar's name. Inbar also jumped through all the hoops UCLA put up for the job, including submitting a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement, which is currently all the rage in colleges and universities. He even shares the politics of the majority of the psychology department.

But on his podcast, Inbar had expressed relatively mild concerns over the ideological pressures that DEI statements impose and wondered aloud whether they do harm to diversity of thought. As a result of this petition—signed by only 66 students—UCLA did not hire Inbar. And he's not the only academic this has happened to. Far from it.

James Kirchick
New York Times

Excerpt: The tentative, lawyerly answers given last week by three university presidents at a House committee hearing investigating the state of antisemitism on America’s college campuses have generated widespread revulsion across the partisan divide. When none of the presidents — representing Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania — could muster a straightforward reply to the question from Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, about whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” amounted to “bullying or harassment,” many prominent Democrats joined Republicans in denouncing the testimony.

But two wrongs don’t make a right. If the problem with campus speech codes is the selectivity with which universities penalize various forms of bigotry, the solution is not to expand the university’s power to punish expression. It’s to abolish speech codes entirely.

Eric Kelderman
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Delegates to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges may vote on Tuesday to require the examination of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts as a condition of accreditation, according to Belle Wheelan, the group’s president.

If that vote is successful, it could set up a clash with state politicians who describe DEI efforts as violating legal bans on racial preferences and a way to enforce liberal groupthink on college campuses.

Ariana Figueroa
NC Newsline

Excerpt: One of Thomasina Brown’s favorite books is a memoir about a girl who deals with the grief of losing her father and struggles with her sexual identity. Brown, a 16-year-old student at Nixa High School in Nixa, Missouri, said in an interview that she felt a connection with the book, as she grieved the loss of her own father and came to terms with her own queer identity.

That book, “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” is one of the more than 3,300 books that have been banned during the 2022-2023 school year, a 33% increase from the previous school year, according to a report by PEN America, a group that is dedicated to fighting book bans and advocates for the First Amendment.

KC Johnson
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: The Biden administration intends, in October, to release new Title IX regulations to deal with campus sexual assault and harassment. In their proposed form, the regulations strip from accused students virtually all of the procedural protections they currently have under Title IX, unless a local court ruling requires their college or university to employ a fairer process.

To understand why we are waiting for yet another set of Title IX regulations, it’s important to understand the history of the last 12 years.

Kathryn Palmer
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Law schools may soon be required to adopt written free speech policies under a proposal being considered by the American Bar Association.

The potential changes come after, but are not a direct consequence of, multiple high-profile incidents of student disruptions of speakers at law schools prompted widespread debates about free speech, academic freedom and students’ right to protest.

Laura Beltz
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Kiosks and bulletin boards, where students share everything from band tryout notices to political statements, are a classic part of a college campus. Even in the age of social media, posting materials where fellow students will likely see them, on the way to class or their dorm, is a critical avenue for expression.

But the University of South Dakota put a roadblock smack-dab in the middle of that avenue with its heavy-handed Poster and Advertising Policy.

By Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic

Excerpt: John D. Haltigan sued the University of California at Santa Cruz in May. He wants to work there as a professor of psychology. But he alleges that its hiring practices violate the First Amendment by imposing an ideological litmus test on prospective hires: To be considered, an applicant must submit a statement detailing their contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

By Adrienne Lu
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: A former psychology professor this week sued the University of California system, claiming that its use of diversity statements in hiring represents “a thinly veiled attempt to ensure dogmatic conformity throughout the university system.”

By Hannah Natanson
The Washington Post

Excerpt: Books about LGBTQ people are fast becoming the main target of a historic wave of school book challenges — and a large percentage of the complaints come from a minuscule number of hyperactive adults, a first-of-its-kind Washington Post analysis found.

Sophie Brissett and Isabella Dail
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organized a rally on Cannon Green to disrupt the second annual Community Care Day (CCD), a day that promotes well-being on campus, on Friday.

Around 60 protesters gathered in East Pyne Courtyard at 5 p.m. before moving to Cannon Green — an area of campus where organized protest is now explicitly prohibited. Despite new signage this semester on Cannon Green that reads, “This space is reserved for officially sanctioned University events and may not be used for other organized activities without permission,” the demonstration was able to continue as planned.

Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: An art installation on Wednesday, Oct. 8 sponsored by Tigers for Israel (TFI) and Chabad House on the Frist North Lawn, which was meant to draw awareness to the Israeli hostages held in Gaza and Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, may be the first test case of the University’s policy on symbolic structures following last spring’s ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment.’

Jerry A. Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: Well, Princeton, via its president Christopher Eisgruber, has wussed out of adopting a crucial plank in a university free-speech platform: institutional neutrality. The man simply can’t hold back his ideological or political opinions, even if they chill the speech of faculty and students.

Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: After years of promising it would find a way to punish professor Amy Wax for her controversial views on race and gender, Penn delivered today — despite zero evidence Wax ever discriminated against her students.

Faculty nationwide may now pay a heavy price for Penn's willingness to undercut academic freedom for all to get at this one professor. After today, any university under pressure to censor a controversial faculty member need only follow Penn’s playbook.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: A conservative Princeton University professor tried to give a speech this month at Washington College centering on the need for campus free speech. Students disrupted his talk and succeeded in ending it.

It was another example of what are often called student shoutdowns or “heckler’s vetoes”—though the meaning of that phrase is contested—disrupting conservative speakers. Perhaps most prominently this year, in March, Stanford University students disrupted a talk by Judge Kyle Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Nick Gillespie
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Nick Gillespie speaks with Dr. Wolf von Laer of Students for Liberty, and Sean Themea of Young Americans for Liberty about how campus activism may change after the murder of Charlie Kirk. They discuss how the tragedy has affected their organizations, what it means for the future of student organizing, and how libertarian ideas about free expression and individual rights fit in today's campus climates.

Kathryn Palmer
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: For months, East Tennessee State University’s art museum displayed without issue a provocative piece of art depicting a conservative politician as a fascist. But in the last two weeks, the exhibit—which closed as scheduled on Dec. 6—became mired in controversy after Republican lawmakers took note and began calling for its removal in late November.

In response, on Dec. 2, ETSU’s Reece Museum introduced a content warning and started requiring viewers to sign a waiver before entering the exhibit, “Evolution” by Joel Gibbs, which shows U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson in front of swastikas morphing into crosses. The move drew the ire of free speech groups.

Robert Shibley
FIRE

Excerpt: This election season, Pennsylvania State University appears to be unleashing its own October Surprise — against its students. In a brazen display of ignorance of (or disdain for) long-settled law, Penn State this semester has trampled over the rights of student journalists and other students registering their classmates to vote. There are times in FIRE’s case work where we can understand the flawed logic that leads an administrator to break the law, but there is no excusing or justifying what has happened on the Penn State campus over the past few weeks.

Kate Hidalgo Bellows and Jasper Smith
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Faculty members at Columbia University say they disagree with a pro-Palestinian student group’s recent endorsement of violence, but some support the group’s right to express that sentiment.

On October 8, Columbia University Apartheid Divest — or CUAD — revoked an apology it made in the spring on behalf of a student activist who posted a video of himself saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” The group, an unrecognized coalition of student organizations, said in last week’s statement that the apology was written by several organizers, not the student, and did not represent the group’s values.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: After months of delaying a planned vote on the issue, the University of California’s Board of Regents voted 13 to 1 Thursday to prohibit academic departments and other academic units from posting political statements on their website homepages.

The ban comes after some UC departments posted statements supporting Palestinians. Josiah Beharry, the student member on the board, was the only no vote.

Jessie Appleby
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Excerpt: The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents announced in late December that it voted unanimously to terminate long-time chancellor of the UW-La Crosse campus, Joe Gow, after discovering his involvement in the adult film industry.

In short, while the First Amendment may indeed protect Gow’s continued employment as a faculty member with UW, the university will likely cite grounds for terminating his position as chancellor around the terms of his appointment and the high-ranking and public-facing nature of the position.

Elisabeth H. Daugherty, Brett Tomlinson, Julie Bonette, Carlett Spike
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: The pro-Palestinian protesters at Princeton slowly began cleaning up their encampment on Cannon Green Tuesday morning. Signs had been put up around the area reading, “This space is CLOSED in preparation for University events,” and workers began installing lighting for Class Day.

A video posted on Instagram by the protesters seemed to show a Public Safety official telling them Tuesday morning to leave. Urvi, a spokesperson for the protesters who is a first-year Ph.D. student and has asked to be identified only by her first name, would say only that they stand by their demands. Princeton Israel Divest Now (PIAD) published a statement on social media at 1 p.m. and said they were considering their next steps.

Annie Rupertus and Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Princeton tradition and a political protest clashed on Friday, April 19, as pro-Palestine demonstrators walked near the Class of 2026 Declaration Day celebration, where recently-declared students in black and orange sweaters posed with department banners behind the iconic Nassau Hall. Some paused amid the protest, while others continued taking photographs with protesters in the background.

The demonstration, which ran for over an hour and a half, was a show of support for the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Columbia University, where students set up tents beginning Wednesday morning on the campus’ center lawn to demand Columbia divest from companies tied to Israel. On Thursday, Columbia President Minouche Shafik authorized arrests and suspensions of over 100 protesters at the encampment.

Ilya Somin
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Yesterday, federal District Judge William K. Sessions, III, of the District of Vermont ordered the immediate release of Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, whom ICE had detained and slated for deportation based on her anti-Israel speech. 

In earlier posts on this topic, I have urged universities to file lawsuits challenging Trump's speech-based deportation policy, rather than letting students like Ozturk fend for themselves. I was happy to see that many schools (including my undergraduate alma mater Amherst College) filed an amicus brief supporting a lawsuit brought against the policy by the American Association of University Professors  (the court recently issued a preliminary ruling in favor of AAUP, allowing the case to go forward). But universities should do more to protect their students.

Jonathan Turley 
Jonathan Turley’s Blog

Excerpt: Last night, I discussed a new executive order signed by President Donald Trump that included an extension of his earlier move against “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies to the area of higher education. The order makes direct reference to the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023) banning the use of race in college admissions and instructs the Departments of Education and Justice to investigate any circumvention of the prohibition by colleges and universities. 

The order effectively carries out the mandate declared by Chief Justice John Roberts: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” Since the EO has not been officially posted on the government website, I have included the full language below.

Eric Kelderman
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: The accrediting group that oversees about 170 colleges in California and Hawaii is considering cutting the words “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion” from the standards that its member colleges must meet.

The WASC Senior College and University Commission is considering the changes as conservative lawmakers at both the state and federal level consider ways to curb the authority of accreditors and eliminate any consideration of DEI on college campuses.

Emma Camp
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: The University of Maryland is now facing a lawsuit after unilaterally canceling all student expressive activities planned for October 7. The move came after the university received "numerous calls" expressing outrage over events organized by campus pro-Palestine groups to mark the anniversary of Hamas' massacre of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians last year.

Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Last spring, many of the students protesting the war between Israel and Hamas demanded that their universities divest from weapons manufacturers and other companies profiting off the bloodshed in Gaza. Some called for total divestment from Israel, accusing college leaders of being complicit in a genocide as the death toll of Palestinian civilians continued to climb.

Multiple universities agreed to weigh the divestment demands—among other concessions—often in exchange for students dismantling encampments. So far, few have actually moved to divest; some boards are still weighing the option while others have voted against it. But a handful of institutions have vowed to disclose their holdings, and some, such as San Francisco State University, have agreed to re-evaluate their investment screening processes.

Katherine Knott and Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The Biden administration’s new Title IX regulations, which strengthen protections for LGBTQ+ students and change how colleges respond to reports of sexual harassment, take effect today nationwide. Kind of.

So far, federal judges have issued six injunctions temporarily blocking the Education Department from enforcing the new Title IX rule in 26 states and hundreds of colleges in other states in response to lawsuits challenging the protections for LGBTQ+—and especially transgender—students. The first injunction was handed down June 14 and the most recent one issued July 31. The drip, drip, drip of court orders over the last seven weeks is part of what’s become an incredibly contentious fight over Title IX that’s left college officials fearful, frustrated and unsure about what comes next.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling against race-based college admissions (which involved Harvard), and the likely illegality of hiring faculty based on race, colleges are beginning to ratchet back on DEI-based admissions and hiring. (Although nobody’s yet taken a college to court for requiring DEI statements, I’m betting that such statements would be banned for constituting compelled speech.)

Now that MIT banned DEI statements for faculty job applications, the other great school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard, has just followed suit. According to the two articles below, Harvard has banned diversity statements.

Christopher Bao, Elisabeth Stewart, and Annie Rupertus
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Following a rushed special meeting on Sunday, April 28, the Undergraduate Student Government (USG) Senate published a statement around 2 p.m. on Monday, April 29 calling on the University to “publicly reaffirm the right to speak and peaceably assemble” and “commit to suspending neither student groups nor individuals without meaningful due process.”

USG President Avi Attar ’25 called the special meeting for 5 p.m. on Sunday, and nearly 100 attendees were present. This follows deliberation over two drafted statements — one composed by U-Council Chair Daniel Shaw ’25 and U-Councilor Isabella Shutt ’24, and the other by Senator Samuel Kligman ’26.

Randall Kennedy
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: On a posting for a position as an assistant professor in international and comparative education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, applicants are required to submit a CV, a cover letter, a research statement, three letters of reference, three or more writing samples, and a statement of teaching philosophy that includes a description of their “orientation toward diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.”

At Harvard and elsewhere, hiring for academic jobs increasingly requires these so-called diversity statements, which Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning describes as being “about your commitment to furthering EDIB within the context of institutions of higher education.” By requiring academics to profess — and flaunt — faith in DEI, the proliferation of diversity statements poses a profound challenge to academic freedom.

Mary Whitfill Roeloffs
Forbes

Excerpt: The New York Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit in Manhattan on behalf of a pair of pro-Palestinian student groups that were suspended last fall after their protests pushing for a cease-fire in Gaza allegedly violated university policy—as tension over the Israel-Hamas war spills onto campuses and causes some donors to withdraw support of legacy schools.

Maryclaire Dale
Associated Press

Excerpt: Pro-Palestinian faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have sued the Ivy League school to stop it from sending sensitive internal material to a congressional committee investigating antisemitism on campus — a probe they call “a new form of McCarthyism.”

Professor Huda Fakhreddine and other members of Penn Faculty for Justice in Palestine fear the school is poised to send files, emails, student records and other material to Congress, putting both their safety and academic freedom at risk.

Joanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: As protests raged on college campuses after the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October, Columbia University set out to codify clear-cut guidelines for on-campus demonstrations. But the announcement of the Student Group Event Policy and Procedure plan drew swift backlash for being overly restrictive; among other things, it required “special events”—including any gathering expected to draw “high attendance/capacity”—to be registered two weeks in advance.

Four months later, the university has released new guidelines, called the Interim University Policy for Safe Demonstrations. It was born in part out of concerns that the previous iteration had been established too “hastily,” said Dr. Jeanine D’Armiento, chair of Columbia’s University Senate executive committee and an associate professor of medicine in anesthesiology.

J. Brian Charles
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: At least 14 states this year will consider legislation that could dismantle the ways college administrators attempt to correct historical and structural gender and racial disparities and make campus climates more inclusive, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education analysis.

The Chronicle has identified at least 19 bills that will be considered in the coming months that seek to ban the employment and funding of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices; the use of pledges by faculty and staff to commit to creating a more inclusive environment on campus, commonly known as diversity statements; mandatory diversity training; and identity-based preferences for hiring and admissions.

Komi Frey
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: From 2016 to 2022, most University of California campuses participated in an experimental program, funded by the state Legislature, to use diversity, equity, and inclusion statements as the first cut in faculty-applicant pools. According to UC’s guidelines, the purpose of diversity statements is for applicants to explain what they have done and plan to do to serve underrepresented-minority people on campus — specifically, African Americans, American Indians, and Hispanics/Latinos.

By making political values the sole criterion at the initial hiring stage, UC-faculty searches strayed from the American Association of University Professors’ bedrock 1915 “Declaration of Principles,” which states that scholars have a duty to remain neutral and not act in the interests of any particular segment of the population.

Kathryn Palmer
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Some faculty members at Indiana University at Bloomington fear academic freedom on their campus is under attack by a local congressman reacting to claims of antisemitism among some members of the student government association.

The lawmaker, U.S. Representative Jim Banks, a conservative Republican and evangelical Christian who is running for U.S. Senate in 2024, has asked the university’s president to address allegations of antisemitism on campus related to the Israel-Hamas war or potentially risk losing federal funding

Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe
Reason Magazine
 
Excerpt: California Community Colleges' new teaching standards "mandate viewpoint conformity" and "compel professors to teach and preach the State's perspective," according to a lawsuit called Palsgaard v. Christian, filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE.  

Join Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe this Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern for a discussion with Jessie Appleby, an attorney with FIRE, and Bill Blanken, the plaintiff and a chemistry professor at Reedley College in California, who says the standards advanced by the state's community college board amount to "compelled speech" in the classroom.

Aaron Terr
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Vulgar. Lewd. Indecent. Hateful. Those are four types of speech the city of Arab, Alabama, bans from signs within its borders. But as FIRE explained in a letter to the city on Tuesday, they’re also four types of speech protected by the First Amendment.