National News 

Frank Hill | North State Journal | April 24, 2025

UNC AFSA Board Member Frank Hill argues that private universities should be free to use non-public dollars as they wish, but that accepting taxpayer funds means answering to elected officials. He advocates a strict public-private funding divide, letting market-driven private universities like Harvard cater to specific ideologies and state universities align with local values, empowering families to choose the education that matches their priorities.

FIRE staff | FIRE Newsdesk | April 22, 2025

Harvard recently rejected Trump administration demands to conduct departmental audits, discontinue DEI, abandon ideological litmus tests, and to hire faculty and admit students to balance liberal and conservative viewpoints. FIRE discusses the process for and legality of pulling federal funding for universities, as well as the First Amendment concerns raised by the Trump administration’s demands.

Dr. Marisol Quintanilla, a nematologist at Michigan State University, faces tenure uncertainty despite her strong academic record. A MSU faculty committee voted to deny her reappointment with tenure, citing “poor collegiality”—a likely mask for viewpoint discrimination over her stances on identity politics. The Dean reversed the decision, but the Provost and Board of Trustees must now decide her fate. Her case demonstrates how DEI policies can stifle dissent rather than foster inclusion.

Key indicators of Americans' support for freedom of speech have decreased over the past four years, according to a survey conducted by Vanderbilt University. Overall, the United States ranked ninth in terms of citizens’ support for free speech based on tolerance for uncomfortable statements and government criticism. This decline is at odds with America’s identity as a top protector of free expression in the world.

Jonathan Turley critiques the World Forum in Berlin, where elites unveiled a “New World Order With European Values.” This EU-style transnational governance aims to curb populism and free speech through strict regulations and “content moderation.” Turley warns of an oligarchic drift, despite free speech victories on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, arguing it silences dissent under the guise of unity. 

In The Indispensable Right, Jonathan Turley critiques universities for trading open inquiry for censorship and proposes the "Athenian Circle"—a vision inspired by Plato and John Stuart Mill, where campuses become sanctuaries for free thought through protected individual autonomy. He suggests tying federal funding to rules that expel violent disruptors, eliminate "free speech zones," and focus discipline on actions, not speech, to rebuild a true marketplace of ideas.

Greg Lukianoff and Robert Shibley of FIRE outline their concerns with the Trump administration’s effort to deport Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil, a Syrian national, is in custody after participating in anti-Israel protests last spring. Shibley and Lukianoff argue that non-citizen students should not be punished for speech that would be protected for citizens, and that, since he has not been accused of a crime, deporting Khalil sets a dangerous precedent for campus free speech.

A student group at Davidson College is reportedly facing disciplinary scrutiny after handing out pro-Israel content on campus, prompting a debate about free speech.

In a recent post, the Davidson chapter of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom student group shared a letter from Davidson officials stating the group may have violated the school’s Code of Responsibility by harassing other students.

On Saturday, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a foreign national, recent graduate from a master’s program at Columbia University, and a campus leader of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the successor organization to the banned chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. Khalil, according to reporting from the BBC, is now in an immigrant detention facility in Louisiana.

Vice President JD Vance recently addressed world leaders at an international security conference in Munich, Germany. In his speech, he decried what he perceived as an abandonment of Western values across much of Europe, as individuals have been prosecuted for what would be considered First Amendment-protected speech in the United States.

In recent years, Alumni Free Speech Alliance chapters have formed at college campuses across the country. Through hosting dissident speakers and supporting the establishment of schools dedicated to teaching the values of Western Civilization, these groups have made tangible changes that enhance academic excellence at their respective campuses.

Below is my column in the New York Post on the unhinged response to Vice President J.D. Vance’s historic defense of free speech in Europe. The chorus of criticism from press and pundits was immediate. Literally speaking through tears, German diplomat Christoph Heusgen responded to VP Vance: “It is clear that our rules-based international order is under pressure. It is my strong belief that this more multipolar world needs to be based on a single set of norms and principles.” Indeed, it is and that is a good thing. Vance was speaking truth to transnationalists who view free speech as a threat to the “international order” that they maintain. The response from the American left was even more bizarre. Not only did CBS’s Margaret Brennan suggest that free speech caused the holocaust, but Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) said that Vance, in defending free speech, used “some of the same language that Hitler used to justify the Holocaust.”

There are concerns that President Trump’s promise to deport foreign nationals who are legally studying in the United States for engaging in pro-Hamas rhetoric may violate students’ constitutional rights. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has condemned Trump’s plan, citing previous Supreme Court decisions that they argue extend free speech protections to alien residents of the United States.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is facing an ongoing debate over its commitment to viewpoint-neutral free speech advocacy. Once steadfast in defending First Amendment rights regardless of ideology, Jordan Heller states, the organization has increasingly prioritized cases aligning with its members’ left-leaning politics. UNC AFSA hosted former ACLU President and renowned free speech advocate Nadine Strossen on campus last spring.

As regular ERI readers and followers of FIRE will know, I’ve been defending free speech on campus since 2001 — nearly all of FIRE’s 25-year history. In 2022, FIRE expanded its mission, going from being the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. This was in no small part because we grew more and more concerned that the free speech crises we were dealing with on campus could and would spill over to other areas of our country.

If 2024 is remembered as the year when “DEI” was deservedly put on the defensive and institutional neutrality gained traction as a long overdue higher-ed reform, what big changes could 2025 bring?

Some hope this will be the year when "the Chatham House Rule" takes academia by storm.

What is “the Chatham House Rule” and why is it needed?

In response to potential restrictions on student protests by the UNC Board of Governors, NC State's Student Senate has introduced Resolution 97, aimed at safeguarding students' First Amendment rights across the UNC System.

The resolution, introduced in the first senate meeting of the spring semester but not yet voted on, comes after discussions at the November Board of Governors meeting about implementing new policies for campus gatherings and protests.

Well, it happened. This year is now officially the worst year on record for free speech on our nation’s campuses.

Throughout 2024, I have been referring to research from my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which showed that 2023 was the worst recorded year for attempts at our colleges and universities to disinvite speakers from campus, cancel performances, take down art exhibits and prevent the screening of films. This is based on FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database, which has been logging these kinds of incidents since 1998.

In a recent Inside Higher Ed/Hanover Research survey, over 90 percent of college professors from public, private, two-year, and four-year universities said they strongly or somewhat agree that academic freedom in higher education is under threat. Moreover, 55 percent believe that academic freedom is under threat on their own campuses.

It’s nearly impossible to discuss the university you attended without mentioning the phrase, alma mater. For many, it’s little more than a linguistic relic, with its resonance dulled by time and habitual incantation. Yet beneath this phrase lies an earnest metaphor.

Let’s break it down: Alma is Latin for “nourishing” and mater for “mother.” Together, the phrase translates to “nourishing mother.”

After the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, many faculty at universities canceled classes, either due to believing that they had to take time to deal with their own disappointment or that students needed time to process their negative emotions. Other professors took class time to allow students to “process their feelings” and deal with what was perceived as a devastating event for all on campus.

Students, faculty, and invited speakers faced retaliation nearly every single day after October 7 for expressing their political beliefs.

The kinds of questions freshmen have to answer at orientation are typically mundane and uncontroversial: “Where are you from?” or “What do you think you’d like to major in?” or “Have you found the dining hall yet?”

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a group of first-years went past the small talk and swapped opinions on one of the most pressing topics facing higher education today — free speech.

It has been, by every measure, a challenging year for free speech on college campuses.

Widespread student protests, legislative efforts to control what is taught and how, and a growing movement to suppress diversity, equity and inclusion programs have created a crisis not seen since the Vietnam War and civil rights protests more than half a century ago. In the process, university leaders have been caught in the crossfire between faculty, students, alumni, parents, donors, trustees, advocacy organizations and members of Congress.

As the U.S. presidential campaign takes a violent turn, colleges and universities need to prepare for major political upheaval and campus disruptions. Last academic year’s campus protests demonstrated that much of higher education is ill-equipped to handle certain political controversies.

The marketplace of ideas is under attack. The front lines have formed on university campuses. And remarkably, universities are leading the charge.

FIRE has criticized the ever-increasing bureaucratization of our nation’s colleges for years. As Greg Lukianoff and Adam Goldstein put it a few years back: “The further a university drifts from its academic purpose, the less committed it will be to academic freedom.”

Having spent more than two decades defending free speech and academic freedom on campus, FIRE knows too well just how true that is. When colleges act more like giant corporations and less like educational institutions, student and faculty rights suffer.

Even Stanford agreed actions by law students — and inaction by administrators — threatened free speech. So where do we go from here?

The liberal ABA may save law schools from themselves.

Higher education did not have a good year in 2023, as evidenced by high-profile resignations at Penn (Liz Magill) and Harvard (Claudine Gay). This followed abysmal televised congressional testimony in which the two Ivy League presidents and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth refused to condemn campus calls for genocide against Jews. Harvard’s disgrace was compounded by revelations of serial plagiarism on the part of Gay.

Generations of Americans have held firm to a version of free speech that makes room for even the vilest of views. It’s girded by a belief that the good ideas rise above the bad, that no one should be punished for voicing an idea — except in rare cases where the idea could lead directly to illegal action.

Today, that idea faces competition more forceful and vehement than it has seen for a century.

Remember the days when college presidents were paid a pittance since universities sponsored by religious organizations and state governments couldn’t pay them a lot in salary? Or when coaches had to tend bar during the off-season to make ends meet?

Yeah, me neither.

Higher education institutions, public and private, were granted nonprofit, tax-exempt status a long time ago to help them compete with the private sector to attract the best and the brightest faculty, administrators and coaches to teach the next generation of citizens. Everything about granting them nonprofit status had to do with “enhancing the educational experience” of every student on campus, not just the jocks or administrators.

Dear members and supporters,

College and university responses to the October 7 attacks by Hamas, and the subsequent response by Israel, have put questions of campus culture in the public spotlight like never before. The clumsy and tone-deaf statements by university presidents in the immediate wake of the attack and, even more dramatically, before Congress last week, have served to deepen public distrust in higher education and its values. As a nonpartisan membership organization dedicated to open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement, HxA takes no position on the moral and political questions raised by the conflict in the Middle East. We do take a position on what role higher education should play.

Talia Khan, an MIT graduate student, had a detailed and powerful statement about what she sees as anti-Semitism on campus (apparently written in response to an invitation from Reps. Fox and Stefanek).

And I think it well reflects how many different things are being mixed together here. For instance, the statement refers to "a radical anti-Israel group at MIT called the CAA" whose members have "stormed the offices of Jewish faculty and staff in the MIT Israel internship office. Staff reported fearing for their lives, as students went door to door trying to unlock the offices." If this is accurate, then it should certainly be punished. Likewise as to "Jewish students being physically blocked from moving through the anti-Israel crowd through the main MIT lobby."

As turmoil over the escalating Israel-Hamas war continues to affect campuses across the world, a multifaith group of U.S. college presidents has issued a statement saying the moment requires “moral clarity” and that they “stand with Israel, with the Palestinians who suffer under Hamas’s cruel rule in Gaza, and with all people of moral conscience.”

HATE HAS NO HOME AT UVA. The words have been plastered all over UVA Grounds for the past week, stretching from the first-year dorms to lampposts on the Corner and covering every pillar of Minor Hall.

Aug 18 (Reuters) - The American Bar Association’s legal education arm on Friday advanced a proposal that would require all law schools to have written free speech policies that protect the exchange of ideas and prohibit disruptive activities.

The ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar voted to send the new freedom of expression rule out for public notice and comment.

A group of scholars interested in free inquiry and the future of higher education met in Princeton last spring and began a conversation about what principles ought to guide a well-functioning scholarly institution dedicated to the mission of the preservation and advancement of knowledge. With radical proposals for higher education reform very much in the air, especially on the political right, it was hoped that it would be helpful to have a statement clarifying the objectives that any reform measure should be seeking to advance.

The National Association of Scholars is delighted that 52 Harvard University professors have formed a Council on Academic Freedom. This group will “advocate for the free and civil exchange of ideas on campus” by promoting the principles of free inquiry, civil discourse, and intellectual diversity. Harvard, no less than other universities, needs professors who defend intellectual freedom—and freedom in general.

The lists of “top colleges” have varied little in many years. They always include the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, etc. But that could change. Colleges of all types can differentiate themselves on the core values of free speech and academic freedom, and those that do will increasingly attract more and better students, faculty, and employment opportunities for their graduates.

There are many factors that go into choosing a college or grad school – affordability, location, and strength in specific disciplines – but many parents and students are overly focused on the prestige of the school.

No one should be made to feel like an “insider” or “outsider” depending on his or her views about abortion, drug legalization, or other contentious issues.

The national conversation over free speech on college campuses is as raw and as polarized as our overall political discourse. No surprise there. What is surprising is our refusal to connect the two.

Let me explain.

The scenes of ideological intolerance have become all too familiar to Americans. Law students shouting down a federal judge at Stanford Law School. College students protesting the new president of the University of Florida, former Republican U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse. Many of our most prestigious colleges and universities have been reduced to ideological monocultures – both inside and outside the classroom.

Is the era of woke censorship coming to an end on campus? The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN, among others, are heralding a new epoch in which university leaders stand up to snowflake students. While it’s encouraging that progressive legacy media outlets are nailing their free speech colours to the mast, these are counter-wavelets on the surface of a rising swell. Progressive illiberalism is not going anywhere because it is baked into the demography of tomorrow’s professors.

America is experiencing two disturbing simultaneous trends: the rise of mob censorship to shut down speaking events on college campuses, and an attempt to justify it as merely the exercise of “more speech.”

Click Link Below to View a Recording of the Debate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elG_zyZya5g

By approving its own version of a noted free-expression statement, the liberal-arts institution takes a major step in the right direction.

Below is my column in Fox.com on the recent controversies at Stanford University and University of California at Davis where students sought to prevent others from hearing conservative speakers. These are only the latest manifestations of a growing anti-free speech movement across our campuses.

The free-speech fallout at Stanford Law School continues after last Thursday’s headline-making, administrator-endorsed shoutdown of a federal judge by students who said his views were too “harmful” to be aired on campus.

Hundreds of students dressed in black and donning face masks emblazoned with the words “counter-speech is free speech” lined the halls of Stanford Law on Monday to protest Dean Jenny Martinez’s subsequent apology to Fifth Circuit judge Stuart Kyle Duncan for the treatment he received when he attempted to speak at the school last week.

Fifth Circuit appellate judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, who was shouted down by Stanford Law School students as administrators looked on in silence, says the protesters behaved like "dogshit."

Watching world events and controversies unfold, such as Russian control of news on the war in Ukraine, may give us a sense of First Amendment pride here. Yet make no mistake: Our nation struggles daily with the impact of and limits on free expression in classrooms, media, social channels and the public square. More than ever, especially among those of us entrusted with leading America’s colleges and universities, we see the need to articulate and help build the skills and dispositions enabled by free expression.