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Tal Fortgang
Law & Liberty 

Excerpt: It’s back to the future on campus free speech. But this time, so much more hinges on what Princeton does next. Universities failed to investigate and punish these dime-a-dozen instances before their supposed conversion to free-speech principles. Yet we have been told that something has changed for the better. This is the perfect test case.

Princeton has announced that it will investigate this serious breach of basic free-expression rules. Videos from the event make it clear enough who had to be escorted out after trying to shout Bennett down. And since the main campus anti-Israel group took to social media to claim credit for the disruption, its leadership should also be in the administration’s crosshairs. The question now is not whether Princeton is capable of identifying a violation of its rules—it is whether it is prepared to enforce them.

Khoa Sands
Princetonians for Free Speech Original Content

National attention on campus free-speech issues tends to focus on only the most sensational threats. Incidents like speaker shout-downs,disruptive protests,physical attacks,major petitions, orunjust firings garner the most attention from alumni and the general public. And rightly so – there is no shortage of incidents that ought to cause outrage from those who believe in academic freedom and free expression. However, there are subtler threats to free speech in the university that fly under the radar, ignored by the press, alumni, and students, but are no less insidious. They can be as subtle as a state of mind.

George R. La Noue
National Association of Scholars

Excerpt: One of the most powerful influences in higher education today is the concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Managed by an ever-growing bureaucracy and promoting a seductive, though ambiguous, message to this generation of students, DEI continues to grow on campuses. It is estimated that almost one-fifth of all academic positions now require DEI statements to be submitted. In the 2021 UC Berkeley hiring season, 679 out of 893 candidates for life sciences positions were rejected for failing initial DEI metrics and did not have their academic credentials evaluated.

Who could object to these concepts? Seeing a billboard declaring, “Diversity is our strength” doesn’t really hurt anyone, does it? DEI advocates argue that no good person could support monocultures, inequality or exclusion, so the movement is just promoting “common good” ethics.

Katherine Knott
Inside Higher Ed

First-time undergraduates applying for federal student aid will now receive a warning if they indicate interest in an institution where graduates don’t earn more than an adult with a high school diploma.

The new earnings indicator on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid is aimed at ensuring students have more information about their postsecondary options, Education Department officials said in a news release Monday. Consumer protection advocates generally praised the department’s move, while institutional groups criticized it.

Kathryn Palmer
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The Trump administration has made another move that historians say is an attempt to sanitize American history, but one the administration argued is necessary to ensure students have respect for the country.

Last week, Education Secretary Linda McMahon outlined a new plan for how her department would promote “patriotic education” by adding it to the list of priorities that can drive decisions for discretionary grants, including those that support programs at colleges and universities.

Dr. Kendall Conger
RealClearInvestigations

Excerpt: I was heartened to see my former employer, Duke University Health System, quietly reverse its commitment to woke racism this year. I had joined the internal resistance to its diversity, equity, and inclusion crusade and was fired because of it. 

I worked at Duke for 10 years without incident before spending the last few years of my tenure battling the 2021 policy – at the cost of my job as an emergency room physician, which is now the subject of a separate lawsuit I have brought. As much as I would like to proclaim victory, I do not want this episode to get memory-holed by organizational leaders who would rather we forget the moral panic that gripped them and the price many of us paid for their destructive and divisive efforts.

By Marisa Hirschfield ‘27

On April 24th, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens spoke about free speech, journalism, and Israel to approximately one hundred attendees gathered in Guyot Hall. The event, entitled “Writing About Israel as a Columnist and as a Jew,” was co-sponsored by a variety of campus organizations, including B’Artzeinu and the Center for Jewish Life. I attended in my capacity as a Writing Fellow for Princetonians for Free Speech, a contributor to the event.

Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed 

Excerpt: House Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee released the full version of a long-awaited tax bill Monday that does for higher ed exactly what they suggested it would in a draft version Friday: dramatically increase the excise tax on wealthy colleges’ endowments.

If the legislation passes, the tax rate for each institution would range from 1.4 to 21 percent, depending on the size of its endowment and the number of students it enrolls, according to the 339-page bill. As with the existing endowment tax, the increases would apply only to private institutions.

Katherine Knott
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: If colleges and universities want to receive funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), they’ll have to certify that they don’t operate any diversity, equity, inclusion or accessibility programs that violate federal antidiscrimination laws, under a new NIH policy announced Monday.

The change appears to codify parts of President Donald Trump’s executive orders that banned funding for DEI programs and builds on the strategy to leverage colleges’ research funding to compel certain behaviors. But the new policy goes even further than the president’s directives, barring colleges from boycotting Israel or Israeli businesses if they want to receive NIH grants.

Caroline G. Hennigan and Bradford D. Kimball, Crimson Staff Writers
Harvard Crimson 

Excerpt: The Harvard Law School student body voted on Thursday to call on the University to divest from Israel — delivering a decisive endorsement of language that Law School administrators harshly criticized before it went up for a vote.

The resolution, which called on Harvard to “divest from weapons, surveillance technology, and other companies aiding violations of international humanitarian law, including Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine,” passed with 72.7 percent of votes in favor, with 842 students participating. Nearly 2,000 students attend HLS.

Jerry A. Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: One of the most odious forms of censorship in modern science. or in any discipline that produces empirical results, is to simply ignore the results of or even refuse to publish a study simply because it gives results you—or a journal or a newspaper—don’t like because they go against current ideology.

Now we have another case, with two media organizations—this time including the NYT—ignoring a study on the inimical (yes, inimical) effects of DEI training on intergroup harmony. Both articles are from late last year.

Thomas F. Powers
Quillette

Excerpt: The Trump administration’s opening policy blitzkrieg (on day one alone: 48 “presidential actions,” a record 24 Executive Orders, and 78 past executive orders revoked) has touched many different policy areas, but none more powerfully than DEI.

How effective will Trump’s legal assault be? The dominant interpretations of DEI and radical progressive ideology set forth in books today focus on the causal role of bad ideas and other “cultural” factors. If these interpreters are correct then, regardless of how decisive they are, the actions of the Trump administration are superficial and doomed to fail unless accompanied by some broader intellectual and cultural movement to change Americans’ hearts and minds.

Steven Lubet
The Hill

Excerpt: With the incoming Trump administration all but declaring war on American universities, it is essential for educators of every persuasion to close ranks in defense of academic freedom. Unfortunately, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), once the “most prominent guardian of academic freedom” in the U.S., has lost its way.  

As reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, the AAUP has lately been under fire from erstwhile allies who believe that the 109-year-old organization has turned away from political neutrality and compromised its core mission. In just the last four months, the AAUP has repeatedly taken positions that undermine rather than support academic freedom.

Lee Gutkin
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: If you’ve taught at a college or university in the last decade, you’ve almost certainly sat through some required diversity, equity, and inclusion programming. Perhaps you were on a search committee and had to meet regularly with a diversity consultant who promised to help root out your implicit biases. Or you were a graduate student asked to attend a workshop on “antiracist pedagogy.” Perhaps you were invited, or even compelled, to attend a session on “allyship training.”

All of this stuff has been controversial for a long time, felt by many to be a form of ideological indoctrination. But a new study sponsored by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and the Rutgers University Social Perception Lab suggests that, even on its own terms, it just doesn’t work.

Alyssa Lukpat
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: A federal judge ruled the University of California, Los Angeles, must ensure equal access to campus for Jewish students after some alleged in a lawsuit they were blocked by protesters at this spring’s pro-Palestinian encampments.

Daniel Diermeier
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Harvard University announced last week that it will no longer “issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function” as an academic institution. This is welcome news for all of us who have long been concerned about politicization of universities and the resulting erosion of free expression in academia.
     
Yet [the] new policy makes a crucial omission that is at the core of the current controversy on campuses. Students at universities nationwide have called on their institutions to join the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. According to the Harvard working group co-chairs, it didn’t “address, much less solve, the hard problem of when the university should or shouldn’t divest its endowment funds from a given portfolio.

Joe Killian
NC Newsline

Excerpt: The dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts at UNC-Chapel Hill could begin in earnest as soon as this month, say two members of the university’s board of trustees. Trustees will likely meet this month in a yet-to-be-scheduled special meeting, finalizing the campus budget before forwarding it to the UNC System Board of Governors for final approval.

“I think the best way for the board to move forward is to advocate for the removal of all DEI funding from the UNC-Chapel Hill budget,” Trustee Dave Boliek, chair of the board’s Budget, Finance and Infrastructure committee, told NC Newsline. “I’m going to advocate that that be the case.”

Collin Binkley, Annie Ma and Noreen Nasir
Associated Press

Excerpt: When she started writing her college essay, Hillary Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted it all. When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. For many students of color, instantly more was riding on the already high-stakes writing assignment. Some say they felt pressure to exploit their hardships as they competed for a spot on campus.

Mark S. James
Academe Blog

Excerpt: Last August, my colleague wrote about how our university’s leadership has embraced a top-down corporate model as the way of running the university, and he proceeded to describe various instances when they have ignored shared governance and threatened academic freedom. This trend has continued unabated.

The most recent example of this is perhaps the most blatant, and it poses the most serious threat to academic freedom and shared governance yet. The administration is now deploying our office of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to impose a policy that has been rejected by our faculty two times now. But, as Nikole Hannah-Jones recently observed, DEI is now being used against efforts to increase diversity, promote equality, and foster inclusion.

Sharon Otterman
New York Times

Excerpt: Three weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College in New York posted a statement on its departmental website in support of the Palestinian people. Below the statement, the professors posted links to academic work supporting their view that the struggle of Palestinians against “settler colonial war, occupation and apartheid” was also a feminist issue. Two days later, they found that section of the webpage had been removed, without warning, by Barnard administrators.

What happened next has sparked a crisis over academic freedom and free expression at Barnard at a time when the Israel-Hamas conflict has led to tense protests on American college campuses and heated discussions about what constitutes acceptable speech.

Katherine Knott
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Colleges and universities would have to report annually the number of civil rights complaints they receive and how they addressed them under a new Senate bill introduced Thursday.

Sponsored by Dr. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican senator, and Senator John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, the legislation would require colleges to give students information about how to file a complaint with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. The bill is largely a response to the recent rise in reported antisemitic incidents on college campuses. But the lawmakers say they are seeking to support any students who experience violence or harassment on college campuses due to their heritage.

Heather Mac Donald
City Journal

Excerpt: MIT president Sally Kornbluth announced on Wednesday that the university would soon reveal its inaugural Vice President for Equity and Inclusion (VPEI). If one wanted evidence of the disconnect between university culture and the outside world, Kornbluth’s announcement provides it.

Kornbluth exemplifies a rule of thumb: anyone in a university leadership position not affirmatively opposed to race politics supports antimeritocratic ideas. She also demonstrates just how blinding campus ideology is: her first instincts are to parrot local received wisdom about MIT’s being insufficiently “welcoming” to diversity and not yet being a place where “all feel that we belong,” in Kornbluth’s words.

Bari Weiss
The Free Press

Excerpt: DEI is not about the words it uses as camouflage. DEI is about arrogating power.

And the movement that is gathering all this power does not like America or liberalism. It does not believe that America is a good country—at least no better than China or Iran. It calls itself progressive, but it does not believe in progress; it is explicitly anti-growth. It claims to promote “equity,” but its answer to the challenge of teaching math or reading to disadvantaged children is to eliminate math and reading tests. It demonizes hard work, merit, family, and the dignity of the individual.

An ideology that pathologizes these fundamental human virtues is one that seeks to undermine what makes America exceptional. It is time to end DEI for good. No more standing by as people are encouraged to segregate themselves. No more forced declarations that you will prioritize identity over excellence. No more compelled speech. No more going along with little lies for the sake of being polite.

Kian Petlin, Devon Rudolph, and Vitus Larrieu
Daily Princetonian 

Excerpt: A speaker event with former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Monday was interrupted at various points, with approximately 20 protesters walking out of the event, an extended disruption by an individual who does not appear to have an affiliation with Princeton in the middle, a subsequent fire alarm interruption, singing by the event’s attendees at the end, and yelling between protesters and event attendees in the courtyard after. 

Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The Education Department is planning to move TRIO and numerous other higher education programs to the Labor Department as part of a broader effort to dismantle the agency and “streamline its bureaucracy.”

Instead of moving whole offices, the department detailed a plan Tuesday to transfer certain programs and responsibilities to other agencies. All in all, the department signed six agreements with four agencies, relocating a wide swath of programs.

Graham Piro
FIRE 

Excerpt: FIRE has previously argued for colleges and universities to adopt institutional neutrality, both as a boon for the campus climate and as an insurance policy for the university. By declaring itself neutral on major political and social issues, a university ensures that it does not chill potential dissenters on campus by constantly taking official positions on unresolved topics. 

But recently, two public universities demonstrated that they misunderstand what institutional neutrality entails. They used the principle to restrict student speech under the guise of protecting university neutrality.

Josh Moody 
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Less than a day after having its ability to host international students revoked by the federal government, Harvard University successfully sued the Trump administration to block the move. A judge granted a temporary restraining order late Friday morning.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Thursday afternoon that the Trump administration had stripped Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification in a letter that vaguely accused Harvard of a “failure to adhere to the law.”

Kate Hidalgo Bellows and Katherine
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: In June 2020, as millions took to the streets to protest anti-Black racism, the president of the University of Virginia, James E. Ryan, created a small team with an ambitious agenda.

The university needed bold ideas, he told the new Racial Equity Task Force, and it needed them quickly.

Michael A. Yassa
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: DEI is under fire—not just from politicians, but from within the academy itself. What began as a push for equity now faces an existential crisis. Faculty, students and even longtime advocates are questioning whether DEI has lost its way—whether it’s become too symbolic, too scripted or too powerless to make real change.

I spent five years as a DEI officer in higher education. I pushed for change in an academic system that claimed to want it. I still believe in DEI. Yet, I’ve seen how often it fails—not because the ideas are wrong, but because the execution is. Diversity, equity and inclusion, when thoughtfully and strategically embedded, can be transformative. But when they become symbolic gestures, checkbox exercises or top-down mandates imposed without trust or buy-in, they often backfire. I’ve seen both.

John McWhorter
Persuasion

Excerpt: In combating DEI, Donald Trump is doing the right thing. In that sentence I just wrote, I almost choked writing the six final words. But it is what I believe. A stopped clock is right twice a day, and it is high time America engaged in an honest conversation about this business called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

However, the actual substance of Trump’s Executive Order “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” reveals—big surprise—a smash of the knout, a coarse, unreflective bleat in the guise of statecraft. Getting DEI right while retaining the moral sophistication our nation is capable of will require actions much more specific—intelligent, even.

Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier has emerged as a strong advocate for institutional neutrality in recent years, arguing that institutions often go beyond their core mission when they strike stances on public issues. He expounded on those views in an interview with Inside Higher Ed in which he discussed the growing number of institutions that have adopted institutional neutrality and how tensions in the Middle East and related protests on campuses are driving university leaders to rethink how they engage on contentious issues at home and abroad.

Greg Lukianoff

The Eternally Radical Idea

While I certainly know critics of Israel who are not at all motivated by anti-Semitism, I have run into a lot more outright anti-Semitism over the past 10 years — and particularly in the last six months — than I ever thought I'd see in my lifetime. Anti-Semitism is vile, and I believe it is absolutely a growing problem today.

Given my point of view on this, it might be surprising to people that FIRE and I oppose the Antisemitism Awareness Act. To those who understand how a viewpoint-neutral defense of the First Amendment works in practice, however, this should come as no surprise at all.

Liam Knox
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Almost as soon as the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action last June, Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey fired off a response. Within hours of the rulings in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill cases (SFFA), Bailey ordered the state’s public colleges and universities to comply—which in his view meant removing race-conscious policies “not just [in] college admissions, but also scholarships,” an extrapolation that many legal experts say is unnecessary.

University officials quickly began amending institutional grants and scholarships across the system’s four campuses, according to Christian Basi, the Missouri system’s director of public affairs. Since then, they’ve worked methodically to bring other awards in line—including endowed scholarships that donors specified should go only to members of certain racial or ethnic groups.

Benjamin Mazer
The Atlantic

Excerpt: “People will die if doctors misdiagnose patients.” This is true as far as it goes. But the recent news that prompted Elon Musk to share this observation on X was not precisely about medical errors. It was about what he might call the “woke mind virus.” A story by Aaron Sibarium in The Washington Free Beacon had revealed complaints that UCLA’s medical school was admitting applicants partly based on race—a practice that has long been outlawed in California public schools. And this process wasn’t just discriminatory, the story argued; it was potentially disastrous for the public.

Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Louisiana governor Jeff Landry signed a bill into law Wednesday that grants him new powers to directly appoint board chairs at the state’s public colleges and universities. Landry, a Republican, then immediately ousted University of Louisiana System board chair Jimmy Clarke and re-appointed Mark Romero, who held the role under previous governor John Bel Edwards in 2019.

The bill landed on Landry’s desk on May 31 after flying through the state legislature with strong Republican support. Sponsored by Republican senator Valarie Hodges, the controversial bill reflects a growing push from conservative lawmakers to exercise greater influence in higher education governance.

Kyle Ingram and Korie Dean
Raleigh News & Observer

Excerpt: The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees voted to divert millions of dollars spent on diversity, equity and inclusion programs into public safety instead, ahead of an expected policy change statewide to restrict DEI.

At a special meeting Monday morning, the board unanimously moved to reallocate the $2.3 million that the university spends on DEI programs toward police and other public safety measures as part of its annual budget approval process. The university’s operating budget totaled more than $4 billion in the previous fiscal year.

Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic

Excerpt: Roughly a decade after the movement for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, began to spread in American higher education, a political backlash is here. The Chronicle of Higher Education has tallied 80 bills since 2023 that aim to restrict DEI in some way, by banning DEI offices, mandatory diversity training, faculty diversity statements, and more. Eight have already become law, including in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, North Dakota, and Utah. The worst of these laws violate academic independence and free speech by attempting to forbid certain ideas in the classroom.

Utah’s Equal Opportunities Initiatives, or H.B. 261, which was signed into law in January, is more promising. It attempts to end the excessive and at times coercive focus on identity in higher education while also trying to protect academic freedom with carve-outs for research and course teaching.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: This year began with a seismic event in higher education: Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard University’s first Black president after Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and leading crusader against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, publicized plagiarism allegations against her.

Her resignation was followed by high-profile allegations against a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who’s married to one of Gay’s most prominent critics, which fueled concerns over a coming “plagiarism war” with the right and left lobbing accusations at scholars on the other team. The war, so far, looks like a one-sided affair. Rufo and conservative media outlets have published multiple accusations of plagiarism and research misconduct, several of which appear serious and have made splashes in major mainstream media outlets.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Republican politicians have targeted diversity, equity and inclusion in state after state. They’ve passed laws to limit, defund or outright ban related programs. They’ve demanded information on universities’ DEI expenses and their numbers of DEI positions.

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who won office in 2021 after campaigning against the alleged teaching of critical race theory in K-12 schools, is diving into the details. His education secretary’s office has requested to review syllabi from upcoming diversity-themed courses at two public universities: George Mason, which has been planning a broad “Just Societies” mandate, and Virginia Commonwealth University, which has been planning a new “Racial Literacy” requirement. The universities say they have complied with the unusual requests.

Angel Eduardo
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Last week, FIRE, along with the Academic Freedom Alliance and Heterodox Academy, released an open letter urging universities to adopt the principle of institutional neutrality articulated by the University of Chicago’s 1967 Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action, also known as the “Kalven Report.”

The Kalven Report posits the best way to guard against establishing party lines on campus — and deterring those who disagree from speaking out — is for schools to remain “the home and sponsor of critics,” rather than the critics themselves. This requires committing to “an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain[ing] an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.”

Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack

Excerpt: I appeared on “Rising” with Robby Soave and Briahna Joy Gray on Wednesday, and I have some thoughts I want to share with you all coming off of that discussion.

However, the big question that came up during our discussion was whether the presence of DEI administrators is a threat to free speech on campus — and, well … yes, it is. But it’s not only DEI administrators. If my more than two decades doing this work has taught me anything, it’s that administrators in general are threats to free speech on campus.