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Excerpt: The moral panic sweeping the country about the freedom of students to express themselves on university campuses is on point—just not in the way you think. While some people take aim at the “cancel culture” that they argue is rampant in higher education institutions, for a large contingent of students—those whom the National Collegiate Athletics Association and institutions have branded “student athletes”—the absence of academic freedom is a product of design.

Whether it is academic clustering that funnels athletes into classes and majors perceived to be less arduous, surveillance systems that monitor athlete movements in and out of the classroom, practice demands that dictate course schedules, television commitments that take players out of classes, or team rules that limit what athletes are permitted to tell the world about their experiences, students who are athletes have little choice but to accept profound violations of their academic freedom.

Excerpt: Bias Response Teams (BRTs) proliferated in recent years on college and university campuses. FIRE’s research demonstrates that, where deployed, BRTs chill student speech across the political spectrum. Using the anti-terrorism slogan “See Something, Say Something!,” Virginia Tech’s Bias Intervention and Response Team (BIRT) does something particularly egregious: it acknowledges that certain speech is protected and thus not subject to discipline, then promises to intervene anyway.

In challenges brought by the organization Speech First, the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Fifth and Sixth Circuits recently held that similar BRTs objectively chill student expression. However, in September, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia denied Speech First’s motion to prevent Virginia Tech from enforcing its bias response procedure, among other policies that infringe students’ freedom of expression. On Tuesday, FIRE filed an amicus curiae brief in Speech First v. Sands, in support of Speech First’s appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Excerpt: After its student government denied a student group the benefits of university recognition, on the absurd and infantilizing basis that the group’s open discussion format might mean that “the conversation might very easily devolve” and cause “harm,” Emory University’s administration has now decided to refuse to recognize any new student group for the foreseeable future. Faced with the opportunity to uphold its commitment to free speech, Emory chose instead to betray this commitment and violate its students’ expressive rights.

The Emory University School of Law Student Bar Association first rejected the Emory Free Speech Forum’s application for university recognition in October 2021. Last fall, the Student Bar Association, the student leaders charged with recognizing groups on behalf of the law school, refused to recognize the group because it supposed that open discussions might lead to “harm,” as the discussions — among law students — might involve controversial topics.

From Jackson v. Wright, decided yesterday by Judge Amos Mazzant (E.D. Tex.):

This case stems from the suppression of academic scholarship at the University of North Texas …. UNT is a public institution that hales itself as an academy through which students and faculty may, among other things, "publish … and/or display their scholarship freely as appropriate to their respective UNT-assigned roles and responsibilities.”

Plaintiff's area of expertise became a topic of controversy in November 2019 at a convention of the Society for Music Theory. Philip Ewell, a Black professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York, delivered for the Society a plenary address titled "Music Theory's White Racial Frame." As a lead editor of the Journal (of which Schenker is the namesake), Plaintiff organized a symposium and invited music scholars to submit papers in response to Professor Ewell's talk and publication. Plaintiff also suggested Professor Ewell's criticisms of Schenker might themselves have constituted anti-Semitism. The backlash was swift.

Excerpt: I recently resigned from my position as full tenured professor at the University of Toronto. I am now professor emeritus, and before I turned sixty. I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. There were many reasons, including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online. But here’s a few more:

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?