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Excerpt: Teachers from Tennessee to Iowa are swept up in a wave of outrage led by GOP politicians nationwide over how schools teach kids about race in U.S. history. The changes have come so quickly, and with such ferocity, that many teachers were caught off guard. But now educators are under pressure and grappling with how to respond, whether with protests, potential lawsuits, a departure or early retirement from the profession, or just attempts to accommodate the new policies.

Anton Schulzki, a public high school teacher in Colorado Springs and the president-elect of the National Council for the Social Studies, says teachers’ options vary greatly depending on where they are and how secure they are in their jobs. “Teachers are part of the community. They have bills and mortgages to pay. They’ve got their own families to raise. So they may play it a little safe,” says Schulzki.

Excerpt: On Saturday, thousands of educators and others gathered virtually and in person at historic locations in more than 20 cities to make clear that they would resist efforts in at least 15 Republican-led states to restrict what teachers can say in class about racism, sexism and oppression in America. Organized by local educators across the country in association with several social justice organizations, the National Day of Action is meant to raise public awareness about the legislation and to send a message that they will not lie to students about the country’s racist past and present.

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the country, said the restrictions on teaching racism are dangerous. “No matter our color, background, or Zip code, we want our kids to have an education that imparts honesty about who we are, integrity in how we treat others, and courage to do what’s right.”

Excerpt: Attorneys for UNC-Chapel Hill will meet with the legal team of Nikole Hannah Jones Thursday to find “a potential resolution” to the tenure stand-off that has generated international headlines. But students, faculty and members of the university’s board of trustees say regardless of whether a resolution can be found, the damage has been done: to the school’s reputation, trust in university leadership and the norms under which the school has long operated.

Last week, the university saw the tangible cost of its inaction on Hannah-Jones’s tenure. Lisa Jones, a renowned chemistry professor UNC was attempting to recruit from the University of Maryland at Baltimore, decided against coming to the school. Jones, who is Black, had been eagerly recruited by the school’s chemistry department. But in a letter to the school she called the treatment of Hannah-Jones “very disheartening.”

Excerpt: Yale University appears to be in the midst of a meltdown. You may find that irrelevant, or even amusing, but you shouldn’t. Because Yale’s sad condition, unfortunately, is common to many of our most important institutions.

We see publishers where the staff successfully demand the banning of authors they don’t like. We see software companies where employees, instead of doing their jobs, spend hours talking politics and trying to politicize their companies. We see news organizations taken over by “woke” ideology. We see teenagers kicked out of school for tweets made years earlier. And now, in a place that is supposed to be all about the rule of law, we see anonymous mob rule. We hear a lot about justice, but anonymous accusations and power politics aren’t justice, and places that are ruled in such a fashion tend to do badly.

Excerpt: Yale University’s School of Medicine has decided to restrict access to a recording of a talk by psychiatrist Dr. Aruna Khilanani. The lecture, delivered online April 6 as part of the school’s “Grand Rounds” lecture series, generated public outcry over Khilanani’s discussion of racial stereotypes about white people, and some violent subject matter including fantasies of shooting them. The School of Medicine has said the talk was “antithetical to the values of the school” and cited the “extreme hostility, imagery of violence, and profanity expressed by the speaker” as grounds for overriding the considerations of freedom of expression. Khilanani has said that her words have been “taken out of context,” and that she prefaced her remarks as using “provocation as a tool for real engagement.”

“Free expression policies must not be discarded when provocative, offensive, or discomforting remarks are challenged—rather, those are the difficult times when free speech must be most robustly upheld.”