Tag: free speech
The Radical Case for Free Speech
If you read certain columnists or follow a particular set of writers and pundits on social media—including me—you know that the First Amendment is always in crisis. Nearly every incursion, whether it’s the shouting down of a conservative speaker on a college campus or an alleged incident of hate speech, gets shoved into a civil-liberties outrage machine, generating new cycles of vitriol and pushback. And yet the resulting debates, on op-ed pages and elsewhere, can feel strangely abstract and academic.
The Return of the Big Lie: Anti-Semitism Is Winning
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By now, December’s congressional hearing about anti-Semitism at universities, during which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT all claimed that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their university’s policies only “depending on the context,” is already a well-worn meme. Surely there is nothing left to say about this higher-education train wreck, after the fallout brought
The Real Problem With American Universities
Updated at 7:33 p.m. ET on January 30, 2024
Just about everyone in America seems to be angry at higher education. Congress is angry. State governments are angry. Donors are angry. Parents are angry because schools are so expensive, and students are angry because they aren’t getting what they paid for. Just 36 percent of Americans now tell pollsters that they have significant confidence in higher education, down from 57 percent less than a decade ago.
Elite schools in particular
The Artists Crying ‘Censorship’ – The Atlantic
For the past few years, the right has worn itself out decrying “cancel culture”—claiming that left-wing mobs have destroyed the career of artists, writers, and freethinkers—and equating it with censorship. Liberals have typically been the first to point out that this is absurd. If someone says or does something that offends your sensibilities, you are of course free to avoid supporting that person’s professional or creative endeavors with your time and money. That is not censorship—it’s merely a
College Administrations Are Failing Their Palestinian and Jewish Students
“I lost 14 family members in the church bombing in Gaza,” Layla told me.
Layla requested that only her first name be used, due to safety concerns. She is a Palestinian American student at Columbia University. Grieving with dignity there, she said, has felt impossible. She has been repeatedly called a terrorist while walking on campus wearing a keffiyeh—a traditional Palestinian scarf, which has become a symbol of resistance. One student, she recalled, asked her if she was a Hamas … Read more
If Peace Were a Prize
To begin, let me tell you a story. There were once two jackals: Karataka, whose name meant “cautious,” and Damanaka, whose name meant “daring.” They were in the second rank of the retinue of the lion king Pingalaka, but they were ambitious and cunning. One day, the lion king was frightened by a roaring noise in the forest. The jackals knew it to be the voice of a bull, nothing to be scared of, and they persuaded the bull to
The Worst DEI Policy in Higher Education
Attacks on faculty rights are frequent in academia, where professors’ words are now policed by illiberal administrators, state legislators, and students. I’ve reported on related controversies in American higher education for more than 20 years. But I’ve never seen a policy that threatens academic freedom or First Amendment rights on a greater scale than what is now unfolding in this country’s largest system of higher education: California’s community colleges.
Roughly 1.9 million students are enrolled in that system. Its
The Moral Failure of Campus Hamas Apologists
Campus politics in America irrevocably changed this week when student groups that champion the noble goal of justice for Palestinians endorsed the evil means of war crimes in pursuit of it.
Last Saturday, hundreds of gun-toting men stormed into Israel by land, air, and sea with the express purpose of killing as many Jews as possible. They succeeded in perpetrating a pogrom reminiscent of the Cossacks and the Nazis. They murdered civilians in their homes as their families watched. They
Red States Are Rolling Back the Rights Revolution
The struggle over the sweeping red-state drive to roll back civil rights and liberties has primarily moved to the courts.
Since 2021, Republican-controlled states have passed a swarm of laws to restrict voting rights, increase penalties for public protest, impose new restrictions on transgender youth, ban books, and limit what teachers, college professors, and employers can say about race, gender, and sexual orientation. Some states are even exploring options to potentially prosecute people who help women travel out of
Elon Musk’s Latest Target Hits Back
Over the past few days, hundreds of thousands of posts on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, have lambasted a Jewish organization that many people are only vaguely aware of: the Anti-Defamation League. The #BanTheADL campaign, started by overt white nationalists and later boosted by Elon Musk himself, accuses the Jewish civil-rights group of seeking to censor the site’s users, intimidate its advertisers, and generally abrogate American freedoms in service of a sinister liberal agenda.
I’m pretty familiar with