As FAIR Advisor and Harvard Professor Steven Pinker tweeted, this is “the story of my colleague, biologist Carole Hooven @hoovlet, slandered & persecuted for uttering true & banal but taboo biological facts.” In Hooven’s piece, she explains that the attack against her by Harvard’s DEI task force director “runs contrary to Harvard’s stated academic freedom principles, yet no disciplinary action was taken, nor did any university administrators publicly support my right to express my views in an environment free of harassment.”

Crimson

In an unsparing piece, Brooks Anderson ‘25 calls for the elimination of Harvard’s administrative bloat. Anderson documents that “Harvard employs 7,024 total full-time administrators, only slightly fewer than the undergraduate population.” The solution to “outrageously expensive” tuition? “Knock on every office door and fire anyone who does not provide significant utility,” tie “tax-free status and grants to responsible spending,” and tax the endowment. Related Tablet piece: Administrators are Strangling our Universities; Related Silverglate Quillette piece: Bloated College Administration Makes College Unaffordable.

New York Times

Emma Goldberg documents new ways of thinking at today’s business schools, including HBS, where “students are also learning about corporate social obligations and how to rethink capitalism.” On a blackboard, an HBS professor writes a string of words to discuss: “Capitalism. Scarcity. Inequality.” Goldberg writes that “assumptions long woven into the syllabus are open for questioning: the wisdom of maximizing profits, the idea that America’s version of capitalism is functioning properly.”

Crimson

Jacob Miller ‘25 argues that the lack of conservative professors and students at Harvard reflects “the very real and disturbing decline of ideological diversity at this school.” He goes on to say that “while Harvard has made tremendous strides in increasing racial and ethnic diversity, it has…completely reneged on its commitment to diversity of beliefs.”

In the 2022 Free Speech Rankings. Harvard ranks 170 out of 203 schools, or in the bottom 16% (University of Chicago is #1). Meanwhile, based on FIRE’s data, Eric Kaufmann put together Viewpoint Diversity Rankings— Harvard ranks 131 out of 159 schools, or the bottom 17%.

Citing the rankings in All US Students are Afraid to Speak, Harvard alum Samuel Abrams (AM ‘07, PHD ‘09) explains that “all students are being deprived of the chance to develop the skills needed to navigate a complex world of difference, trade-offs and compromise, the foundation for a successful polity” and that those who care about the democratic health of the nation should be worried.

Chronicle of Higher Ed

Jonathan Zimmerman exposes a quiet truth within American higher ed—stifling dissent, harassing and reporting Chinese students who criticize China. “The harassment of Chinese students [who speak out against China] violates the most basic principles at the heart of our academic mission: debate, dialogue, and the open exchange of ideas. But so far as I know, no major college leader has expressed their support for the students’ speech rights or condemned Chinese state agents for menacing them.”

College Fix | Declaration

More 1,600 professors have signed a letter that “calls on universities and professors to adopt and implement the ‘Chicago Trifecta’”— the Chicago Principles, the Kalven report and the Shils report. “Historically, censorship has supported monstrous regimes and their ideologies,” the letter warns. “True justice and freedom cannot exist without each other.” The letter began circulating prior to The Stanford Academic Freedom Conference where FAIR advisors Steven Pinker, Niall Ferguson and Douglas Murray spoke along with other influential thinkers. Recordings are now available.

The Hill

The authors raise alarms about the lack of debate around DEI’s infiltration into every major institution. “With rapidity and stealth, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) ideology has come to replace the classical liberal values of merit, fairness and equality (MFE)” … it’s a “revolution” accomplished “with almost no debate” that risks “a new era of institutionalized McCarthyism.” The authors point to Harvard alum Dorian Abbot’s MFE as a viable alternative that deserves consideration.

City Journal

Writing under a pseudonym, a professor warns peers against the corruption of putting activism above truth. “The problem arises when, in an academic role, a non-truth-oriented motivation transforms into a non-truth-oriented intention…when the desire to make the world better stops propelling one…through scholarly work…and instead turns into a desire to say what will advance the cause rather than what one knows to be true.” Put simply, “One cannot be simultaneously an activist and a professor.”

The Free Press

This long-form piece details what has happened inside the nation’s leading organization of pediatricians. The stunning exposé “shows how a small group of doctors with virtually unaccountable power can exert tremendous influence over public policy.” At stake “is not just lockdowns or puberty blockers but the credibility of the medical establishment itself.”

Heterodox STEM

A 63-year-old accelerator physicist writes a scathing letter to a publishing company after being asked to review a paper adhering to inclusion, diversity and equity (IDE) policies—”It has no business asking us to do anything besides reviewing the scientific quality of a submission irrespective of the race, gender, sexual orientation, age or civil status (incarcerated or not). I absolutely refuse to care about such things.” The physicists urges, “It is time to grow a pair and fight for reason and the scientific method.”

College Fix

At the November 2022 Stanford Academic Freedom Conference, Dr. Bhattacharya, “a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert…recounted the difficult road he faced as a result of offering his professional medical and scientific opinions during the height of the pandemic.” Bhattacharya and other experts warned about the deleterious effects of lockdowns and the need to focus on the elderly. [Update: Bhattacharya’s blacklisting has been exposed in the Twitter Files].

The Free Press

A Williams biology professor, born under a Brazilian dictatorship, sounds the alarm on authoritarianism in the U.S.— “The risk of cancellation…is not theoretical. My fellow scientists and I are living it. What is at stake is not simply our reputations, but our ability to pursue truth and scientific knowledge…social justice…[has] morphed into an ugly authoritarianism.” Related warnings come in an AFA interview with Russian-born USC chemistry professor Anna Krylov. “I started to notice alarming trends in the scientific community…censorship and other forms of suppression creeping into our institutions.” “We need to resist it,” she says, “even if that entails danger.”

BBC

In a BCC lecture on freedom of speech, author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns of the "epidemic of self-censorship" which could lead to "the death of curiosity, the death of learning and the death of creativity.”

FAIR Substack

Artist and writer Franklin Einspruch argues what is obvious to some, but heretical to others—cultural appropriation isn’t real. “As far as we know, every people of the earth in every era produced visual culture, styling and modifying their bodies, adorning themselves, and producing durable objects of representation and abstraction. New culture came about the way new people came about—by mixing. The anti-appropriationists of today sound much like the anti-miscegenationists of the past.”

Wall Street Journal

The WSJ’s Arts in Review editor Eric Gibson writes that “Like higher education, art museums face a crisis of purpose. They are now widely seen as shameful relics of the era of Western colonialism, whose proper social role is to advance a progressive agenda… Driving all this are the commissars, who have arrogated to themselves the status of superior beings, entitled to pass summary judgment on artists, art, its institutions and supporters. There is no humility, only moral vanity.”

Persuasion

An essay on the nuance and power of James Baldwin. While some attempt to mold Baldwin to select narratives on race, Sahil Handa argues that the scope of Baldwin rejects narrow interpretations. “James Baldwin did not tell a shallow story. Nor did he tell a black and white story. He asked people to discover an entirely new story… Baldwin loved America in the same way that he loved himself: fiercely, relentlessly and, most of all, critically. Contained within the country’s ruinous past was a magnificent potential…”

Glenn Show | Uncommon Knowledge | Fifth Column-Honestly

Three conversations with FAIR Advisors on black identity and experience in America are worth a listen. FAIR Advisors include Glenn Loury (AM ‘82), Kmele Foster, Ian Rowe (MBA ‘93) and John McWhorter. We found The Glenn Show’s cross-generational conversation powerful and insightful, with both Steele and Woodson bringing firsthand civil rights movement experience into their current thinking on the ethics of racial identity in America.

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Deseret

Princeton Professor and FAIR Advisor Robert P. George dispels the notion that young people on college campuses are independent, rebellious thinkers. Rather, he paints a picture of conformists more concerned with being regarded as smart and sophisticated, aided by universities’ systemic mechanisms of indoctrination. The answer, he writes, lies with professors intentionally encouraging and modeling free thinking.

Washington Post

“If Rushdie had been murdered then, I would have been happy. Now that he has been nearly killed…I am shattered,” explains FAIR Advisor Ayaan Hirsi Ali. “When someone attempts to take Rushdie's life, what’s at stake is not just the inventive language and far-sighted vision of one person. Also at stake is our freedom to share ideas: the lifeblood of Western civilization.”

Atlantic

An excellent piece by HBS and HKS Professor Arthur Brooks who believes “the happiness crisis in America is at its core a crisis of our personal and shared sense of meaning.” He writes why the pursuit of happiness is getting harder, how we need a sense of meaning in our lives and shared sense of meaning as a country, and how we, as a country, can (and must) correct course now.

Tablet

A persuasive, expansive piece detailing “how the major institutions of American society all came to sing in the woke chorus, and what can be done about it.” Lind traces woke infusion into every institution, attributing the tactic to “entryism,” often associated with Trotsky. The tactic is infiltration—using the freedoms and deregulation of the private sector to capture American society without the consent of the governed. The solution? The “expansion of democratically accountable government.”

Academic Freedom Alliance

An excellent interview with former ACLU president and Harvard alum Nadine Strossen (AB ‘72, JD ‘75). Strossen discusses why college students aren’t to blame for their close-mindedness, the importance of humility, how today’s censorship is worse than during the McCarthy era, why protection from harmful speech does more harm than activists believe it does, and how our system of justice is imperiled by law school students who refuse to take the other side of an argument.

Atlantic

Caitlin Flanagan argues that freedom of expression isn’t the tool of the powerful; it’s the tool of the powerless. With biting wit, she skewers America’s free speech frenemies before throwing a dire warning shot across the bow of the entire country, coming to the conclusion that “Whenever a society collapses in on itself, free speech is the first thing to go. That’s how you know we’re in the process of closing up shop… You might want to look into relocating to one of the other countries shaped by the principles of the American Revolution. They aren’t hard to find. Just go to Google and type in the free world.”