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Tag: Free speech

  • Students and Faculty Fear Tenure and DEI Bills Could ‘Destroy’ Texas Colleges

    Students and Faculty Fear Tenure and DEI Bills Could ‘Destroy’ Texas Colleges

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    As a law student at the University of Texas at Austin, Sam Jefferson worked in the school’s diversity office. Jefferson said he learned firsthand just how essential the offices are to the success of students from underrepresented groups.

    Now it’s on the brink of being eliminated by a Texas bill that would bar public colleges from having diversity offices or officers.

    “You’re talking about legislation that’s going to take away one of the only places that students can feel seen, heard, and acknowledged and helped,” said Jefferson, who just graduated.

    Monday marks the end of a Texas legislative session in which higher ed played a starring role. Lawmakers made substantial investments in public higher ed, boosting funding for community colleges and creating an endowment to support emerging research universities. Yet many lawmakers also disparaged colleges’ diversity programs and tenure policies, leading to marathon hearings in which students, faculty, and alumni protested vehemently.

    Over the weekend, Texas lawmakers passed final versions of Senate Bill 17, which would prohibit diversity offices starting in 2024, and SB 18, which would make changes in tenure. Both are sponsored by Sen. Charles Creighton, a Republican. The bills now await the signature of Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican.

    A spokeswoman for the University of Texas Board of Regents didn’t respond to a request for comment. Texas colleges, like other institutions across the country, have generally declined to comment on pending legislation.

    Proponents of banning DEI efforts say requiring students, faculty, and staff to sign diversity statements or participate in DEI programming produces a “chilling effect” on campus. “Many of these programs have been weaponized to compel speech instead of protecting free speech,” Creighton said in April. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.

    Tenure elimination has been a key point of emphasis for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican, who said the institution allows professors to “live inside a bubble” in a statement last month. “Over the past year, it has become abundantly clear that some tenured faculty at Texas universities feel immune to oversight from the legislature and their respective board of regents,” Patrick said.

    The bills have undergone changes since being introduced in March. Senate Bill 18 originally proposed banning tenure entirely, and the Texas Senate endorsed that idea, but the drastic shift didn’t have traction in the House. Revisions in Senate Bill 17 carved out more exceptions that allow public colleges to describe efforts to serve diverse students if required by federal agencies or institutional accreditors.

    Still, many students and faculty in Texas say that the legislation remains harmful — and that even the deliberations about banning tenure and DEI this spring were damaging to their campuses.

    If Senate Bill 17 becomes law, diversity administrators will be out of a job in six months. Last week, one diversity officer announced her departure. Carol Sumner, vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Texas Tech University, will take a similar job at Northern Illinois University.

    “It’s not just that these things will have an impact on student life,” Jefferson, the law graduate, said. “It’s that they already have.”

    ‘Our Larger Campus Family’

    Banning DEI offices would affect not only students of color, but also veterans, LGBTQ+ students, and disabled students, four Texas students told The Chronicle.

    “DEI isn’t just about enrollment,” said Jordan Nellums, a graduate student at UT-Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. “It’s about OK, how can we make sure that this student group feels comfortable enough on this campus — that way they can become part of our larger campus family.”

    Kat Williams, another UT-Austin grad student, said she waited for over 14 hours to speak against the diversity-office ban in April. “I didn’t really have 14 hours to waste that day, but it happened anyway,” Williams said.

    Williams said she doesn’t believe diversity programs and policies make students feel uncomfortable speaking their minds in the classroom, as critics allege.

    “At least in my experience as an instructor, that’s not the case whatsoever,” Williams said. “If somebody has an unpopular opinion, they still get voiced quite frequently.”

    Alexander De Jesus-Colon, a senior at the University of Texas at Dallas, said he went to the campus’s Galerstein Gender Center as early as last year to discuss the situation on campus. He was told that the center was already preparing to shut down if the Texas Legislature voted to ban such offices.

    Since then, he has become involved in organizing against the legislation with the group Texas Students for DEI. He said legislators have refused to hear student voices.

    “Nobody wants to listen to us,” De Jesus-Colon said. “These legislators, they’re busy passing bills that they’re not even fully aware of the consequences of what they’re doing.”

    At least 34 bills have been introduced in 20 states that would curb colleges’ DEI efforts, according to The Chronicle’s DEI Legislation Tracker.

    For Jefferson, the legislation in Texas is reminiscent of strategies wielded by Florida legislators. This month, Florida became the first state in the country to bar public colleges from spending money on diversity efforts.

    “The whole Texas-Florida competition to see who can battle ‘wokeness’ is hilarious,” Jefferson said. “It’s not about the schools — it’s about these political forums.”

    Step Toward Eliminating Tenure

    While some on campuses say the tenure bill could have dealt a worse blow to higher ed, others remain worried.

    The final version, which would take effect in September if it becomes law, defines tenure in state law as “the entitlement of a faculty member of an institution of higher education to continue in the faculty member’s academic position unless dismissed by the institution for good.”

    The legislation also articulates reasons that tenured professors could be fired, such as “professional incompetence” and “violating university policies,” which some faculty members see as vague. What’s more, they see requiring performance evaluations every six years as a stepping stone to eliminating tenure entirely.

    The uncertainty around faculty-job protections is making life difficult for people like Daniel M. Brinks.

    The chair of the government department at UT-Austin, Brinks has had eight different job candidates turn down offers and cite the state’s political environment as a factor, he said.

    Brinks also said that junior faculty members are particularly worried about the future of tenure, while other professors have canceled upcoming courses because of the likelihood that they could come under scrutiny.

    “That bill alone could essentially destroy the notion of a national-level research university,” Brinks said of the tenure bill.

    Even though the legislation doesn’t ban tenure outright, Brinks said, many faculty members still fear that another bill is “right around the corner.”

    “It signals both a general willingness to interfere with the internal governance of public universities and maybe even, more importantly, hostility to the things that we do and the way that we do them,” Brinks said.

    Students are noticing those impacts, too. De Jesus-Colon said several professors have shared with him that they are preparing to face consequences for teaching topics that some Republican lawmakers don’t like.

    Williams, who teaches a course on rhetoric that covers concepts including Indigenous liberation, the Black prophetic tradition, queer pride, and fatphobia, worries that her class material could become a target.

    The bill banning diversity efforts states that it doesn’t apply to course instruction or research. But in recent months, public-college leaders have often played it safe in political climates that appear hostile toward courses about race and gender — directing professors to, for instance, “proceed cautiously” if teaching about reproductive health.

    Until she receives an order or instruction from a supervisor, chair, or dean, Williams said, she doesn’t plan to stop teaching the course because her students enjoy learning the material. The few that don’t, Williams noted, “still say what’s on their mind.”

    Should she be directed to stop or change her mode of instruction, Williams said, she isn’t sure how she would respond.

    “What would I even teach at that point?” Williams said. “If they can’t learn that at a public institution, where are they supposed to go?”

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    Eva Surovell

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  • Montana has become the first state to ban TikTok. Here’s what happens next.

    Montana has become the first state to ban TikTok. Here’s what happens next.

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    Montana has officially become the first state in the country to ban TikTok after Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed the bill into law on Wednesday, May 17. The law is set to take effect in January 2024 and is already facing legal challenges.

    “To protect Montanans’ personal and private data from the Chinese Communist Party, I have banned TikTok in Montana,” wrote Gianforte on Twitter.

    The ban was quickly criticized by the ACLU amid concerns that the bill infringes on First Amendment rights.

    “With this ban, Governor Gianforte and the Montana legislature have trampled on the free speech of hundreds of thousands of Montanans who use the app to express themselves, gather information, and run their small business in the name of anti-Chinese sentiment,” said Keegan Medrano, policy director at the ACLU of Montana. “We will never trade our First Amendment rights for cheap political points.”

    The governor’s office claimed in a news release about the ban that “penalties will be enforced by the Montana Department of Justice,” and that anyone in violation of the law is liable to pay $10,000 per violation, and also liable for an additional $10,000 each day the violation continues, according to the text of S.B. 419.

    “Governor Gianforte has signed a bill that infringes on the First Amendment rights of the people of Montana by unlawfully banning TikTok, a platform that empowers hundreds of thousands of people across the state,” said TikTok in a statement provided to CBS News. “We want to reassure Montanans that they can continue using TikTok to express themselves, earn a living, and find community as we continue working to defend the rights of our users inside and outside of Montana.”

    Last month, Montana became the first state to pass a bill banning the app — which raised concerns from technology experts about how realistic expectations were around enforcement. 

    At a hearing about the bill in March, a representative from TechNet said that app stores “do not have the ability to geofence” apps on a state-by-state basis, making it impossible for the restriction to be enforceable in popular app marketplaces, such as the Apple App Store or the Google Play App Store.

    Some have also argued that banning the app may infringe users’ First Amendment rights. “Montanans are indisputably exercising their First Amendment rights when they post and consume content on TikTok,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, in a statement. “Because Montana can’t establish that the ban is necessary or tailored to any legitimate interest, the law is almost certain to be struck down as unconstitutional.”

    In March, Gianforte banned TikTok from government devices in Montana, joining the Biden administration, which also banned the platform from all federal employee devices.

    Why is TikTok being banned? 

    TikTok has been an ongoing subject of debate in both local and federal government, as concerns mount in several areas, such as the potential for TikTok to be addicting to younger users and the ability for people to use the app to spread misinformation or incite violence. While these are concerns for other major social media platforms as well, what makes TikTok particularly alarming to government officials are privacy issues related to the app’s ownership by China-based ByteDance. 

    Like all Chinese companies, ByteDance has ties to the Chinese Communist Party, and as tensions continue to mount between the U.S. and China, access to user data has become a point of uneasiness for Congress, the Biden administration, and state and local governments. Many now see banning the platform as a simple solution.


    Why TikTok faces bans in the U.S.

    06:51

    TikTok has repeatedly denied that it shares any data with the Chinese government.

    Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s head of public policy for the Americas, has told CBS News that lawmakers’ concerns over TikTok sharing user data with the Chinese government are overstated and “makes for good politics.” He also said that TikTok collects less data than other social media apps and is working to move user data to servers in the U.S., out of reach of China.  

    Some experts agree that national security concerns over TikTok are unfounded.

    Milton Mueller, a professor of cybersecurity and public policy at Georgia Tech, previously told CBS News, “There have been three technical studies done of this. They basically all say it is exactly what they tell you it is in their privacy statement.”

    What comes next?

    A group of TikTok users in Montana on Wednesday, May 17, filed the first challenge to the law in U.S. District Court in Montana. They alleged that the state’s ban on the app infringes on their constitutional right to freedom of speech.

    “The Act attempts to exercise powers over national security that Montana does not have and to ban speech Montana may not suppress,” read the complaint, which was filed by five content creators.

    “Montana can no more ban its residents from viewing or posting to TikTok than it could ban the Wall Street Journal because of who owns it or the ideas it publishes,” the lawsuit continued.

    TikTok has declined to comment on the suit and has not yet announced its own challenge to the law.

    C Mandler


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    C Mandler is a social media producer and trending topics writer for CBS News, focusing on American politics and LGBTQ+ issues.

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  • A Divisive Governor Hits the Commencement Circuit. For Some Students, He’s Not Welcome.

    A Divisive Governor Hits the Commencement Circuit. For Some Students, He’s Not Welcome.

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    It’s not unusual for politicians to speak at public colleges’ graduation ceremonies. But this year, one governor’s controversial education policies have drawn protests and petitions from students decrying how an event meant to be celebratory turned hurtful.

    Glenn Youngkin, the Republican Virginia governor who made the culture war central to his 2022 election campaign, is slated to speak at George Mason University on Thursday. Earlier this month, he delivered an address at Old Dominion University’s commencement.

    At both public institutions, students circulated petitions that collected thousands of signatures. In each case, the petitions took aim at the administrations and asked them to reconsider their decisions to invite Youngkin.

    The events showcase a now-familiar dynamic. Colleges boast of the welcoming environments they strive to provide for students, but their autonomy is being threatened by some Republican lawmakers who have targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and even exerted control over curricula. Such lawmakers aren’t guaranteed a warm welcome on campus, and colleges are left to manage sensitive relationships with the state and their students.

    Youngkin’s education policies have mostly applied to elementary and secondary schools. When the governor took office in January 2022, he signed an order prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory, the academic concept that racism is the product of not only individual prejudice but also embedded in legal systems and policies. Since then, he has ordered K-12 schools to only allow students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms, and sign up for sports teams, that correspond with the sex they were assigned at birth. Students said they worry it’s just a matter of time before such policies will be extended to higher education.

    “By having Governor Youngkin as this year’s commencement speaker, we believe that the university compromises its supposed values of centering students’ experiences and overall well-being,” reads the GMU petition, which had more than 8,000 signatures on Tuesday evening. “When satiating its own desire to appease the powerful few, the university, once again, has abandoned these principles.”

    The Old Dominion petition, with its over 3,000 signatures, was even more pointed: “It is an absolute disgrace that ODU’s president, Brian O. Hemphill, would allow such a disgusting man to speak at this commencement ceremony.”

    Creating channels for student feedback can lead to more inclusive decision making.

    In an emailed statement, Macaulay Porter, a spokeswoman for Youngkin, said, “Governor Youngkin congratulated ODU students as they embark on their next chapters. Now, the governor looks forward to addressing the 2023 graduates of George Mason University and celebrating their tremendous accomplishment.”

    The leaders of both institutions have sought to welcome the governor while also assuring students that they hear them. They noted that their universities have traditions of hosting Virginia governors for commencement. But their approaches differed.

    Gregory Washington, the George Mason president, wrote a nearly 900-word letter to the university community that was published five days after the announcement that Youngkin would speak at spring commencement.

    “As president of the largest and most diverse public university in our state, I support those students who are making their voices heard, and I applaud their courage and commitment to advocate for themselves and their communities,” Washington wrote. “That being said, I don’t believe that we should silence the voices of those with whom we disagree, especially in this forum where there is no imminent threat present as a result of the disagreements.”

    That week about 100 students protested at George Mason, according to local news reports.

    Hemphill has not said as much publicly as Washington has about the governor’s visit. In response to questions from The Chronicle, he wrote in an email that “ODU is committed to fostering an environment for the meaningful expression of ideas.”

    The president said he met with student leaders ahead of the announcement that Youngkin would be the speaker. “It was important to us that they felt their concerns were heard,” he said. “Creating channels for student feedback can lead to more inclusive decision making and help address concerns effectively.”

    One student, who asked to remain anonymous because she worried about retaliation, said she had received an emailed invitation for a 15-minute “year-end discussion” with Hemphill. The meeting took place the following day.

    The invitation was a surprise. “President Hemphill is not somebody you can just meet with,” the student said.

    At the meeting, the student said Hemphill told her the governor would be the commencement speaker and acknowledged that Youngkin had said things that angered certain communities. While he did not say that protesting would be discouraged, he told the student that “we want to welcome him,” she said.

    That meeting was the first in a series of incidents that some Old Dominion students interpreted as intimidation tactics meant to discourage them from protesting during the governor’s appearance. Several students who spoke to The Chronicle on the condition of anonymity had encounters with the campus police. A high-school student who, alongside his brother, an Old Dominion student, held up a banner that said “Blood on your hands,” was temporarily banned from campus.

    The four students who spoke to The Chronicle said they did not want to jeopardize anyone’s chance of walking across the stage and earning their diploma. So a small group met with administrators to learn what kind of protest would be permitted by the university. Officials told them that they could protest as long as it was not “disruptive” and did not stop Youngkin from being able to speak.

    The students put up posters around campus, wrote chalk messages on the sidewalk, circulated the petition, and painted a campus rock that’s often used to share messages. They spread the word that if other students wanted to protest Youngkin at commencement, they should stand and turn their backs to him when he spoke.

    On the morning of the speech, a few students got to campus early. One student was surprised to see that the fliers they’d put up using wheat paste had already been taken down. The rock had been painted over with a pro-Youngkin message earlier in the week.

    As families and graduates filed into S.B. Ballard Stadium, the students handed out new fliers and rainbow pride flags. Campus police officers stayed close, the students said. Some students saw someone whose face was covered approach the rock and repaint it with an anti-Youngkin profanity. None of the students who spoke to The Chronicle knew who it was, or that it was going to happen.

    But the police seemed to take notice. They questioned the students and pulled one aside, telling him that he was a “person of interest,” a student said. After about 20 minutes, they let him go, but some of the students felt intimidated.

    “It was kind of hard to hand out posters when the police are standing there kind of menacingly,” one student said.

    Inside the stadium, Youngkin spoke to about 2,000 graduates. Many held up their pride flags. About 100 turned their backs on the governor, Hemphill said in his email.

    It was kind of hard to hand out posters when the police are standing there kind of menacingly.

    “We were aware that some students intended to protest,” he wrote to The Chronicle. “Trusting students to act responsibly during their protest not only affirms their rights to express themselves, but also empowers them to actively participate in shaping their educational community. With students having the opportunity to engage in meaningful activism, while respecting the importance of the occasion, ODU promoted a culture of civic engagement and active citizenship.”

    One student, his younger brother, and a third student, took the “Blood on your hands” banner to the top floor of a garage that overlooks the stadium. When the governor’s speech began, they unfurled the banner.

    The police were on the top of the parking garage within three minutes, one of those students said.

    “I was pretty anxious, pretty on edge,” he said. “I just kept my eyes forward pretty much, tried to ignore them as much as possible.”

    He engaged in a tug of war over the banner with an officer, he said. Eventually, though, he gave in and took it down. The officers took his name and told him to leave. He was trespassing, they said.

    Police questioned the student’s brother as he was trying to leave. They told him that because he was “trespassing,” he was banned from campus unless and until he enrolls as a student there. The third student said he was questioned further by police officers when he reached the bottom of the parking lot.

    “The situation in question involved two individuals hanging a large sign from the parking garage adjacent to our stadium, which violated the no-sign requirement, blocked a walkway, and was a safety hazard,” Hemphill said in his email to The Chronicle. “In response, they were asked to remove the sign and leave the facility — an action which would have taken regardless of the content of the sign. The non-ODU-affiliated young man was not permanently banned from campus. We are not aware of any other concerns about police interactions.”

    Students had designated space to protest next to the stadium, Hemphill said. Noting the importance of free expression, he said the protesters were respected and the police were not directed to engage with them.

    These students said the administration’s case for the freedom of speech seemed to apply only to the governor and his right to take the stage uninterrupted, not to their right to object to him.

    One ODU student, who is trans, said that having Youngkin speak at graduation transformed the event from a happy one to one that served as a reminder that “there are people out there who want us dead or want us to not have access to the care that we need.”

    He watched the speech from the audience because his girlfriend was graduating.

    “It’s supposed to be a time of pride for her,” he said.

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    Nell Gluckman

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  • A Professor Is Suspended for Suggesting It’s Better to ‘Kill’ Racist or Homophobic Speakers Than Shout Them Down

    A Professor Is Suspended for Suggesting It’s Better to ‘Kill’ Racist or Homophobic Speakers Than Shout Them Down

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    Steven Shaviro, a professor of English at Wayne State University, in Detroit, was suspended this week for a Facebook post saying that it is “more admirable to kill a racist, homophobic, or transphobic speaker than it is to shout them down.”

    Shaviro prefaced the inflammatory comment by saying he does not support people breaking criminal codes. He also wrote in the now-deleted post, made on his personal Facebook page, that right-wing groups invite such speakers to college campuses “to provoke an incident that discredits the left.” Shaviro declined to comment to The Chronicle.

    In an email to the university community on Monday morning, M. Roy Wilson, the president of Wayne State, wrote that the university had referred the situation to “law enforcement agencies” and that Shaviro, who was not named in the email, had been suspended with pay “pending their review.”
    Asked why the university decided to report the professor to the police, a spokeswoman said that she could not provide information about personnel matters.

    We “feel this post far exceeds the bounds of reasonable or protected speech,” Wilson wrote in the email. “It is at best, morally reprehensible and, at worst, criminal.”

    Two graduate students who had worked with Shaviro told the campus newspaper that they didn’t think his post was threatening and that the professor was, in their view, simply drawing attention to a problem: speakers with offensive views who come to public universities primarily to spark protests.

    Over the last few years, many professors have drawn attention for provocative online comments about political issues. That attention is often stoked by conservative- and libertarian-leaning websites presenting the comments as evidence of liberal bias in higher ed — and, in some cases, calling for colleges to punish the professors. (In Shaviro’s case, Wayne State officials appeared to act before such articles were published.)

    The question of how colleges should respond in such cases has been extensively debated — particularly when professors are making comments as private citizens, outside of their professional capacity. Institutions have taken different approaches, with some defending a faculty member’s right to speak freely and others taking disciplinary action.

    Shaviro posted his comment as colleges across the country grapple with a fresh wave of demands from students to cancel events featuring controversial speakers this semester — particularly when those invited speakers oppose LGBTQ rights. The protests have prompted some critics to argue that students are unwilling to learn and merely aim to shout down opposing viewpoints when they come to campus.

    At Stanford University’s law school, the law dean and president apologized to a federal judge appointed under former President Donald J. Trump after he was heckled by students during a campus event. Students had called for the judge to be disinvited, arguing that he had made court decisions that harmed women and LGBTQ people. An administrator who stepped into the fray and condemned the judge’s viewpoint, while also supporting his right to speak, is now on leave following the incident.

    Mary Eberstadt, a conservative essayist who has written about, among other things, religious freedom, consequences of the “sexual revolution,” and critiques of pop culture, published a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Sunday saying she refuses to speak at colleges where she believes she will be met by an “angry mob.” She said she’d just rescinded her acceptance of an invite to speak at Furman University.

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    Sylvia Goodman

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  • A Florida Professor Lost His Job After Complaints About His Lessons on Racial Justice

    A Florida Professor Lost His Job After Complaints About His Lessons on Racial Justice

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    A professor of English at Palm Beach Atlantic University, a private Christian institution in Florida, had his contract terminated this week after a parent complained to the university president about a racial-justice unit in his course.

    The termination of Samuel Joeckel’s position, which he’d held since 2002, touches on issues of academic freedom that have become more fraught as tensions increasingly surround the teaching of race. It also illustrates differing views of what it means to hew to Christian values in higher education.

    Joeckel first learned of the concerns about his teaching on February 15, when a dean and the provost met him outside his classroom to say that his contract wouldn’t be renewed until administrators reviewed materials from his composition class. (Palm Beach Atlantic does not offer tenure; veteran faculty members can enter into two- and- three-year letters of agreement that roll over automatically “upon on-going exemplary service,” according to a university FAQ.) A parent had complained that Joeckel was “indoctrinating students,” the dean said.

    Last week, Joeckel learned that his contract would not be renewed and, in fact, was being terminated early. His last day as a Palm Beach Atlantic employee was Wednesday, and he’ll be returning to campus Saturday with his wife and son to clean out his office. He’s also pursuing legal action against the university, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Joeckel said he has taught the racial-justice unit for the past 12 years, and while he said it’s often generated “really healthy discussion” in the classroom, no university administrator had voiced concern about it before. “As far as what it was this semester that really turned some student off, that that student then felt compelled to tell their mom or dad, and then their mom or dad felt compelled to call the university president, I don’t know,” Joeckel told The Chronicle.

    Joeckel’s termination comes amid a flurry of legislative action in Florida that seeks to limit, at the state’s public institutions, the study of race, gender, and the causes of inequality. And while Palm Beach Atlantic’s status as a private university would exempt it from such legislation, Joeckel says his termination is a product of the political environment.

    I believe asking students to engage the issue of racial justice is rooted in the Christian faith. The gospel calls for Christians to speak truth to power.”

    “Political forces don’t know the difference between public and private,” he said, noting that the dean of the school of liberal arts and sciences had used the word “indoctrinating” on February 15, when Joeckel asked about the nature of the complaint regarding the racial-justice unit. The dean ended that same encounter, Joeckel said, by saying he had to go prepare for the arrival of Gov. Ron DeSantis; the governor appeared at a campus event that evening.

    Two days later, Joeckel said, he was called to a meeting with the dean, at which a human-resources representative from the university was also present. During that meeting, he said, the dean reviewed Joeckel’s syllabus and asked questions about his pedagogy. “They felt that there were some pedagogical weaknesses in the fact that, ‘In a writing course, why are you spending so much time talking about racial justice?’” Joeckel said. But he devotes an equal amount of time to each of the units in the course, and critiques of his pedagogy amounted to “smokescreen tactics” that “obfuscate the obvious,” he said.

    “The issue was clearly that I was teaching a unit on racial justice,” Joeckel said. “I’ve been doing this for 21 years. I know my pedagogy, and obviously I know that the focus of a Composition 2 class is on writing and specifically the production of a research essay. My Comp 2 class is oriented around just that, and it always has been.”

    ‘Provocative and Relevant’

    The racial-justice unit is one of four in Joeckel’s class; the others focus on comedy and humor, gothic and horror, and gender equality. Across two class sessions in late January and early February, according to his syllabus, Joeckel gave a lecture on racial justice, covering such topics as the shifts in popular opinion of Martin Luther King Jr. over time, how usage of the term “racism” had evolved as a tool in political strategy, and racial disparities in in-school suspensions, interactions with police, and incarceration, according to materials he shared with The Chronicle.

    Students also discussed the introduction to The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism, a 2019 book by Jemar Tisby, a professor of history at Simmons College of Kentucky. In the last of the three class sessions in the unit, students wrote an in-class essay in which they were asked to cite the lecture or the Tisby reading. (Each of the four units followed a similar format.)

    The topic of Composition 2 classes at Palm Beach Atlantic are at the professor’s discretion, Joeckel said. At the end of the semester, were he still teaching the course, students would be asked to write a research essay on one of the four units. He deliberately paired two more “intense” topics — racial justice and gender equality — with two “lighter” topics — comedy and humor and gothic and horror — for that reason. “I was just trying to have a balanced approach in terms of topics and themes so that students, regardless of their personalities and intellectual predispositions, could find something in those four units that they can say, ‘I want to write a research essay on that topic,’” Joeckel said.

    To Joeckel, including the racial-justice unit provides a “really interesting and provocative and relevant topic” for students, but is also in keeping with Palm Beach Atlantic’s Christian values. The institution, which enrolls about 3,700 graduate and undergraduate students, was created by the pastor of First Baptist Church in West Palm Beach in 1968 to counter the youth unrest then roiling the nation’s campuses. The goal, one of the founders said, was “to produce college graduates who would improve the moral climate in America,” according to a video recounting the institution’s history.

    “I believe asking students to engage the issue of racial justice is rooted in the Christian faith,” he said. “The gospel calls for Christians to speak truth to power. The gospel calls for Christians to be attentive to the oppressed, the disadvantaged, ‘the least of these.’ As I saw it, for the past 12 years, my racial-justice unit was rooted in the principles that Palm Beach Atlantic University supposedly adheres to.”

    A representative of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, of which Palm Beach Atlantic is a member, said she was familiar with the case but, citing “an ongoing investigation and an HR issue,” declined to comment on its specifics. “The CCCU supports our member institutions and their individual missions as they carry out the Lord’s work on their campuses,” Amanda Staggenborg, the council’s chief communications officer, said in an email to The Chronicle. “The CCCU does not make decisions dictating curricula or how it is taught at our campuses. Knowing that all truth is God’s truth, we trust that our students will graduate with a better understanding of themselves and the world around them having been exposed to and challenged by a broad spectrum of academic theories.”

    Teaching Freely

    The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression came to Joeckel’s defense in a February letter sent to Palm Beach Atlantic’s president, Debra A. Schwinn, after Joeckel’s contract renewal was delayed, saying that his treatment violated the university’s own policy, in which it “expresses a firm belief in the rights of a teacher to teach, investigate, and publish freely,” and that the university was bound by its accreditor to uphold those rights.

    Courts have previously held that institutions cannot decline to renew a faculty member’s contract as a form of retaliation, and Graham Piro, a senior program officer at FIRE, told The Chronicle on Friday that, based on media reports, it appeared Palm Beach Atlantic may have done just that as retribution for Joeckel’s decision to teach about racial justice. “If that’s true, then that’s a huge problem,” Piro said.

    Piro said the Joeckel case is directly linked to DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE” Act, which, among other things, bars training or instruction that “compels” a belief that members of one race are morally superior to another, or that makes an individual “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.” A federal appeals court on Thursday upheld an injunction against the act, which has been characterized as still having had a chilling effect, including the removal of potentially controversial books from libraries in elementary and secondary schools. “Palm Beach Atlantic must meet its commitments that it makes to its faculty, even in the midst of intense public pressure to abandon those principles,” Piro said.

    Meanwhile, Joeckel’s lawyer, Gabe Roberts, of the Jacksonville-based Scott Law Team, said Palm Beach Atlantic’s wrongdoing was evident. “It’s clear in this situation they terminated his contract early and that race, or in this case, teaching about race was a motivating factor in the decision to terminate the contract,” Roberts said. “If race is a motivating factor in an employment decision, that’s illegal in this country.”

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  • Disruption of Speech at Stanford Prompts President to Apologize — and Criticize Staff’s Response

    Disruption of Speech at Stanford Prompts President to Apologize — and Criticize Staff’s Response

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    A student protest that interrupted a controversial speaker at Stanford University last week led its president and law dean to criticize campus staff, including, apparently, the associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion who joined the speaker at the podium and discussed the students’ concerns.

    Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, was invited to give a talk titled “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation With the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter,” by the law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society, a conservative and libertarian legal organization.

    Duncan was met with a room of loud student protesters who said his history of court rulings had caused harm to LGBTQ+ students, and that giving him a platform on campus diminished their safety. (His confirmation to the Fifth Circuit was opposed by groups like the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which cited Duncan’s decisions against rights for same-sex couples and against gender-affirming bathroom access for transgender children.)

    But a free-speech advocate contacted by The Chronicle said the protesters took it too far and prevented Duncan from completing the speech he was invited to give, which she said infringed on his speech rights. The situation at Stanford comes amid a national debate over how to balance free expression and student safety. It is common for conservative student groups to invite provocative speakers to give lectures on campus, which then face backlash from protesters.

    “These students [protesters] are free to engage in counter-speech via peaceful protest, asserting that Judge Duncan’s judicial decisions ‘cause harm,’” wrote Alex Morey, the director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, in an email to The Chronicle. “What happened Thursday was not counter-speech. It was censorship.”

    Stanford leaders appeared to agree. President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Jenny S. Martinez, the dean of Stanford Law School, apologized to Duncan in a joint letter.

    “What happened was inconsistent with our policies on free speech, and we are very sorry about the experience you had while visiting our campus,” the letter read. “We are very clear with our students that, given our commitment to free expression, if there are speakers they disagree with, they are welcome to exercise their right to protest but not to disrupt the proceedings.”

    The letter stated that under Stanford’s disruption policy, students are not allowed to “prevent the effective carrying out” of a public event by “heckling or other forms of interruption.”

    The letter also criticized Stanford staff for their response to the protesters.

    “Staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech,” the letter from Stanford leadership read.

    Neither Tessier-Lavigne nor Martinez were made available for comment, but their letter appeared to reference the actions of Tirien Angela Steinbach, the law school’s associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion. As captured in a video of the event, she joined Duncan at the podium after he apparently requested that an administrator assist in quieting the student protesters. At first, Duncan appeared confused when Steinbach identified herself as an administrator.

    Then, Steinbach proceeded to address the crowd for roughly six minutes, as she shared her support for the student protesters but encouraged them to allow Duncan to speak.

    “I’m uncomfortable because this event is tearing at the fabric of this community that I care about and that I’m here to support,” Steinbach said to the crowd. She continued to explain that for many people in the crowd, Duncan’s work had “caused harm.”

    “My job is to create a space of belonging for all people in this institution, and that is hard and messy and not easy and the answers are not black or white or right or wrong,” Steinbach said. “This is actually part of the creation of belonging.”

    Still, she questioned the decision to invite Duncan to speak.

    Steinbach asked Duncan, “Is it worth the pain that this causes and the division that this causes? Do you have something so incredibly important to say about Twitter and guns and Covid that that is worth this impact on the division of these people, who have sat next to each other for years, who are going through what is the battle of law school together?”

    Steinbach said that she believes the right to free speech must be upheld, because if Duncan’s speech were censored it wouldn’t be long before the protesters’ speech was censored as well.

    But she said she understood that some students might want to change Stanford’s policies to prioritize safety and inclusion.

    “I understand why people feel like harm is so great that we might need to reconsider these policies,” Steinbach said. “Luckily they are in a school where they can learn the advocacy skills to advocate for those changes.”

    The Chronicle emailed Steinbach for reaction to the letter from Stanford’s president and law school dean, but received no answer.

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    Julian Roberts-Grmela

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  • Citing State Law, an Idaho College Censored an Art Exhibit That Mentioned Abortion

    Citing State Law, an Idaho College Censored an Art Exhibit That Mentioned Abortion

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    Lydia Nobles, a New York-based artist, thought everything was going smoothly with the installation of her artwork at Lewis-Clark State College’s Center for Arts and History, in Idaho.

    Nobles’s work, a series of videos of women talking about their experiences with abortion and pregnancy, was going to be included in a group show, called “Unconditional Care,” that focused on health issues.

    But on February 28, the artist got an email from the center’s director, Emily Johnsen, saying that Nobles’s work could not be included in the show. The decision was made, the email said, after consulting with lawyers and “based on current Idaho Law,” specifically a recent law that makes it illegal to use public funds to “promote” or “counsel in favor of” abortion.

    By the time the show opened last Friday, the college had removed two other artists’ works and edited a wall label that mentioned abortion.

    The episode confirms the fears of free-speech advocates who have taken note of Idaho’s particularly restrictive abortion ban. The law’s language is vague, leaving the state’s public colleges to interpret for themselves and their employees what it means to “promote” abortion in the context of scholarship, teaching, and art. Last year the University of Idaho told its staff and faculty members that they must remain “neutral” on the topic of abortion and reproductive health. Such forceful interpretations have not been limited to Idaho.

    The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Coalition Against Censorship wrote a letter to Cynthia L. Pemberton, the college’s president, urging the institution to reconsider its decision to exclude Nobles’s work from the show and condemning its reading of the No Public Funds for Abortion Act, or the NPFAA.

    “The College’s interpretation of the NPFAA — that it applies to works of art depicting the discussion of abortion — demonstrates the potential abuses of the Act,” the letter said. The decision, the groups said, threatens the First Amendment “by censoring Nobles’ important work and denying visitors of the Center the opportunity to view, consider, and discuss it.”

    For her piece, Nobles interviewed 26 people about their pregnancies. Most of the participants had proceeded with abortions, though some had not. For the show at Lewis-Clark State College, she narrowed the work to four videos. She did not intend to advocate for or against abortion, she said, but to allow people to tell their stories.

    “I was really interested in documenting people’s perspectives,” Nobles said. “Allowing them to frame their story how they wanted to frame it.”

    Nobles said she asked the center’s director what the college had objected to, hoping there might be a way to compromise and still include some of her work. But, she said, she never heard back. None of her videos were in the show and her name was not included on the center’s website or the exhibit’s news release.

    The college also removed one of the works by Katrina Majkut, an artist who curated the exhibition. The day before the show opened last Friday, Majkut walked through the exhibit with college administrators. She said they were concerned about a piece of hers that depicts abortion pills. She was told by administrators, whom she declined to name, that she could not include that piece in the show. Majkut said she was also asked to remove some language from a wall label that mentioned abortion in the context of IVF treatments.

    A Lewis-Clark State College spokesperson said in a statement to The Chronicle that college officials became aware of concerns about the show on the night of February 26.

    “Within 24 hours the college engaged legal counsel to try to determine if any of the concerns might be in conflict with Idaho Code Section 18-8705,” the statement said. “On Feb. 28, within hours of receiving legal advice that some of the proposed exhibits could not be included in the exhibition, the college began notifying the third-party exhibit curator and artists involved.”

    Majkut said she did not intend to create the show or a piece of artwork to protest the Idaho law or advocate a position. Both were meant to prompt discussion and learning, she said.

    “I, in my own work and in this exhibit, really aimed to create an exhibit that bridged the gap,” she said, “where anyone, regardless of their political views, could learn and discuss a topic with respect and empathy.”

    To her, the college acted out of fear.

    ”It comes at the cost of free speech and expression and at the cost of academic learning,” she said.

    Michelle Hartney, the third artist whose work was excluded, had included a piece that was a recreation of a 1920s letter that a woman wrote to Margaret Sanger, the nurse and birth-control activist. In the letter, the woman wrote that she had had two abortions, though much of the letter was about the cost and physical toll of her medical care.

    “I was pretty surprised that my piece was pulled,” Hartney said. “I view it as a historical document. It’s really just a copy of that letter.”

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    Nell Gluckman

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  • Roald Dahl’s original books will kept in print, following editing backlash – National | Globalnews.ca

    Roald Dahl’s original books will kept in print, following editing backlash – National | Globalnews.ca

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    Publisher Penguin Random House announced Friday it will publish “classic” unexpurgated versions of Roald Dahl’s children’s novels after it received criticism for cuts and rewrites that were intended to make the books suitable for modern readers.

    Along with the new editions, the company said 17 of Dahl’s books would be published in their original form later this year as The Roald Dahl Classic Collection so “readers will be free to choose which version of Dahl’s stories they prefer.”

    The move comes after criticism of scores of changes made to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and other much-loved classics for recent editions published under the company’s Puffin children’s label, in which passages relating to weight, mental health, gender and race were altered.

    Augustus Gloop, Charlie’s gluttonous antagonist in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — originally published in 1964 — became “enormous” rather than “enormously fat.” In Witches, an “old hag” became an “old crow,” and a supernatural female posing as an ordinary woman may be a “top scientist or running a business” instead of a “cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman.”

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    FILE – Books by Roald Dahl are displayed at the Barney’s store on East 60th Street in New York on Monday, Nov. 21, 2011. Critics are accusing the publisher of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s books of censorship after it removed colorful language from stories such as “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Matilda” to make them more acceptable to modern readers.

    Andrew Burton / The Associated Press

    In Fantastic Mr. Fox, the word “black” was removed from a description of the “murderous, brutal-looking” tractors.

    The Roald Dahl Story Company, which controls the rights to the books, said it had worked with Puffin to review and revise the texts because it wanted to ensure that “Dahl’s wonderful stories and characters continue to be enjoyed by all children today.”

    While tweaking old books for modern sensibilities is not a new phenomenon in publishing, the scale of the edits drew strong criticism from free-speech groups such as writers’ organization PEN America, and from authors including Salman Rushdie.

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    Rushdie, who lived under threat of death from Iran’s Islamic regime for years because of the alleged blasphemy of his novel The Satanic Verses, called the revisions “absurd censorship.”

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    Rushdie, who was attacked and seriously injured last year at an event in New York state, tweeted news of Penguin’s change of heart on Friday with the words “Penguin Books back down after Roald Dahl backlash!”

    PEN America chief executive Suzanne Nossel wrote on Twitter: “I applaud Penguin for hearing out critics, taking the time to rethink this, and coming to the right place.”

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    Camilla, Britain’s queen consort, appeared to offer her view at a literary reception on Thursday. She urged writers to “remain true to your calling, unimpeded by those who may wish to curb the freedom of your expression or impose limits on your imagination.”

    Dahl’s books, with their mischievous children, strange beasts and often beastly adults, have sold more than 300 million copies and continue to be read by children around the world. Their multiple stage and screen adaptations include Matilda the Musical and two Willy Wonka films based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with a third in the works.


    Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka on set of the 1971 film ‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,’ based on the novel by Roald Dahl.

    Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images

    But Dahl, who died in 1990, is also a controversial figure because of antisemitic comments made throughout his life. His family apologized in 2020.

    In 2021, Dahl’s estate sold the rights to the books to Netflix, which plans to produce a new generation of films based on the stories.

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    Francesca Dow, managing director of Penguin Random House Children’s, said the publisher had “listened to the debate over the past week which has reaffirmed the extraordinary power of Roald Dahl’s books and the very real questions around how stories from another era can be kept relevant for each new generation.”

    “Roald Dahl’s fantastic books are often the first stories young children will read independently, and taking care for the imaginations and fast-developing minds of young readers is both a privilege and a responsibility,” she said.

    “We also recognize the importance of keeping Dahl’s classic texts in print,” Dow said. “By making both Puffin and Penguin versions available, we are offering readers the choice to decide how they experience Roald Dahl’s magical, marvelous stories.”


    Click to play video: 'Conservatives criticized from within their own ranks over political ad featuring ‘Willy Wonka’ spoof of Trudeau'


    Conservatives criticized from within their own ranks over political ad featuring ‘Willy Wonka’ spoof of Trudeau




    &copy 2023 The Canadian Press

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  • ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Elon Musk Reportedly Threatens To Sue Twitter Workers Who Leak To Press

    ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Elon Musk Reportedly Threatens To Sue Twitter Workers Who Leak To Press

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    New Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who has described himself as a “free speech absolutist,” is now threatening to sue his own employees who leak information to the press, according to an email he sent to workers reportedly leaked Saturday to a media organization.

    Musk issued a message warning the company’s workers against leaking “confidential” information, and threatening to sue “for damages” those who violated non-disclosure agreements, according to the email obtained by tech outlet Platformer. Managing Editor Zoe Schiffer then distributed Musk’s message — on Twitter.

    Musk asked staffers to sign a pledge indicating they understood his email, and said he expected a response by 5 p.m. Saturday, Schiffer said. She did not post the actual email in an effort to do everything possible to protect the source, she said.

    It was a dramatic turnaround from Musk’s catch phrase “transparency is the key to trust,” and “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

    Musk could not immediately be reached for comment.

    Last year, Tesla owners who tested a beta version of the automaker’s Full Self-Driving technology were asked to sign NDAs to block information critical of the software to the media and the public.

    The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sent letters to Tesla complaining about the software issues — and the NDAs.

    “Given that NHTSA relies on reports from consumers as an important source of information in evaluating potential safety defects, any agreement that may prevent or dissuade participants in the early access beta release program from reporting safety concerns to NHTSA is unacceptable,” the agency wrote in one of the letters last year, Tech Crunch reported.

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  • Elon Musk demands Twitter employees pledge they won’t leak information to the press—and is threatening to sue them if they do: Report

    Elon Musk demands Twitter employees pledge they won’t leak information to the press—and is threatening to sue them if they do: Report

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    Elon Musk has given Twitter employees another ultimatum.

    Last month Musk told them to either sign up for “long hours at high intensity” or leave the company. Many decided to leave.

    Now, he’s demanding they not leak confidential information to the press and is threatening to sue them if they do. What’s more, he’s demanding they sign pledge today to indicate they’ve understood. 

    That’s according to Platformer journalist Zoe Schiffer, who has been closely tracking the turmoil at Twitter since Musk’s $44 billion takeover in late October. 

    Ironically, it appears Schiffer learned of Musk’s latest demands via the very kind of leak he’s addressing, and posted her findings on the platform he now owns.

    Fortune reached out to Twitter on Saturday but did not receive an immediate reply outside of normal business hours.

    “This will be said only once: If you clearly and deliberately violate the NDA that you signed when you joined, you accept liability to the full extent of the law & Twitter will immediately seek damages,” Musk reportedly warns employees in an email. Occasional slip-ups are understandable “but breaking your word by sending detailed info to the media” with the intent to harm Twitter “will receive the response it deserves.” 

    Schiffer included a link to The Tech Worker Handbook, adding, “If you’re a tech worker considering sharing information with the media, you have rights.” 

    She also shared tweet from Musk himself reading, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

    Musk has pledged to make Twitter more transparent and has described himself as a “free-speech absolutist.” 

    Earlier this month, he touted the release of curated internal company communications from before his takeover involving what he described as the “Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter.”

    Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, tweeted in response: “If the goal is transparency to build trust, why not just release everything without filter and let people judge for themselves? Including all discussions around current and future actions? Make everything public now.”

    Musk today tweeted, “Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene.”

    Last month, Musk had nearly two dozen employees who publicly or privately pushed back against him fired, according to the New York Times.

    Not long after taking over the company, Musk laid off about half its workforce. He then told the remaining workers that the company could go bankrupt in the “difficult times ahead” and demanded they work with a “maniacal sense of urgency.”

    Last month, Chris Kelly, an early investor of SpaceX and a former Facebook executive, said Musk’s “chainsaw” approach to Twitter would not likely work and “does not bode well for its future.”

    Our new weekly Impact Report newsletter examines how ESG news and trends are shaping the roles and responsibilities of today’s executives. Subscribe here.

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    Steve Mollman

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  • Physicians for Informed Consent Sues State of California, Argues That Doctor Censorship Bill AB 2098 Violates the U.S. Constitution

    Physicians for Informed Consent Sues State of California, Argues That Doctor Censorship Bill AB 2098 Violates the U.S. Constitution

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    Federal Court to weigh controversial bill that PIC argues is an unlawful targeting of scientific dissent as ‘misinformation’

    Press Release
    –

    Dec 7, 2022


    NEWPORT BEACH, Calif., December 7, 2022 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Physicians for Informed Consent (PIC), an educational nonprofit organization focused on science and statistics, has filed a First Amendment free speech lawsuit (2:22-cv-02147) in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, and request for preliminary injunction, against the State of California and Osteopathic Medical Board of California in order to protect the free speech of all physicians in California.

    The Plaintiffs are PIC and one of its founding members, physician LeTrinh Hoang, D.O., together with Children’s Health Defense, California Chapter. The legal team managing the case are Rick Jaffe, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Mary Holland.

    The lawsuit argues that the State has weaponized the vague phrase “misinformation,” thereby unconstitutionally targeting physicians who publicly disagree with the government’s public health edicts on COVID-19.

    Expert cardiologist and PIC member Sanjay Verma, M.D., has been tracking and cataloging CDC errors in real time. For the case, he has provided what he calls “a detailed declaration exposing the government’s scientific errors and the constitutional dangers of censoring dissent”:

    “To demonstrate these points of vagueness and the general unsuitability of using ‘contemporary scientific consensus’ as a disciplinary criterion, I have prepared a detailed overview of public health response to the pandemic broken down into categories such as Masks and Vaccines (transmission, safety, efficacy of natural immunity). I have also included evidence of what [I testify] would be considered misinformation promulgated by the CDC as well as its withholding of information which led to the then ‘contemporary scientific consensus’ eventually being proven wrong.”

    PIC President Shira Miller, M.D., was active in opposing AB 2098 while it was navigating the California legislative process, and has led the effort to bring the instant lawsuit. Opposing the bill, she wrote, “Public health is not achieved, and scientific knowledge does not progress, by censoring dissenting physicians and surgeons or anyone else. AB 2098 is anti-doctor, anti-public health, anti-science, and anti-free speech.”

    The scheduled hearing on PIC’s motion for preliminary injunction is Jan. 17, 2023. PIC has requested the District Court issue a preliminary injunction that “AB 2098 is unconstitutional on its face.” The Complaint also requests the Court “issue a declaratory judgement that PIC and CHD patient members have a privacy right in their prescriptions for any off-label FDA approved medication” such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. 

    Physicians for Informed Consent is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit educational organization supported only by the generous contributions of our members and supporters. Click here to make a contribution.

    Source: Physicians for Informed Consent

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  • Elon Musk ‘wanted to punch’ Kanye West after deeming the rapper’s swastika tweet an ‘incitement to violence’ 

    Elon Musk ‘wanted to punch’ Kanye West after deeming the rapper’s swastika tweet an ‘incitement to violence’ 

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    Elon Musk explained on Saturday why he suspended Kanye West’s Twitter account on Friday following an antisemitic post from the rap mogul. The suspension occurred just days Musk allowed West back on Twitter. A few months earlier, West had been locked out of his account because of hate speech toward Jews.

    Musk has described himself as a “free-speech absolutist,” vowing to be less restrictive with content moderation than Twitter’s previous leadership. Advertisers, fearful of their brands appearing alongside hateful content, paused their advertising after Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter on Oct. 27.

    Musk’s reasoning regarding West’s suspension might offer insights into where he’ll draw the lines on content moderation in the future.

    West’s account was suspended Friday after he posted an image of a swastika inside a Star of David. That followed West repeatedly praising Adolf Hitler while appearing live on far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars program, where he said “I love Nazis,” whom he insisted “did good things too.”

    Incitement to violence ‘against the law’

    “At some point you have to say what is incitement to violence because it is against the law in the U.S.,” Musk said Saturday during a live Q&A on Twitter Spaces. “Posting swastikas in what obviously is not a good way is an incitement to violence.”

    He added, “I personally wanted to punch Kanye, so that was definitely inciting me to violence. That’s not cool.”

    Musk had earlier tweeted of West, “I tried my best. Despite that, he again violated our rule against incitement to violence. Account will be suspended.”

    Musk also said in the Q&A that Apple had “fully resumed” advertising on Twitter, adding that the iPhone maker is the platform’s largest advertiser. He thanked other advertisers for returning, too. (Amazon plans to restart advertising on Twitter to the tune of about $100 million a year, according to a tweet on Saturday from a Platformer reporter, citing anonymous sources.)

    Musk’s content moderation plans for Twitter

    Musk has fired many Twitter employees involved in content moderation, increasing concerns about hateful content running rampant on the platform.

    The company told Reuters this week that it’s leaning heavily on automation to moderate content, favoring restrictions on distribution over outright removal of certain speech. 

    “Hate speech impressions (# of times tweet was viewed) continue to decline, despite significant user growth,” Musk tweeted. “Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of reach. Negativity should & will get less reach than positivity.”

    That followed the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a London nonprofit, saying on Friday that the number of daily tweets containing slurs was substantially higher compared to the monthly rate before Musk’s takeover. 

    Our new weekly Impact Report newsletter will examine how ESG news and trends are shaping the roles and responsibilities of today’s executives—and how they can best navigate those challenges. Subscribe here.

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    Steve Mollman

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  • The GOP Can’t Hide From Extremism

    The GOP Can’t Hide From Extremism

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    The role of extremist white nationalists in the GOP may be approaching an inflection point.

    The backlash against former President Donald Trump’s meeting with Nick Fuentes, an avowed racist, anti-Semite, and Christian nationalist, has compelled more Republican officeholders than at any point since the Charlottesville riot in 2017 to publicly condemn those extremist views.

    Yet few GOP officials have criticized the former president personally—much less declared that Trump’s meeting with Fuentes and Ye, the rapper (formerly known as Kanye West) who has become a geyser of anti-Semitic bile, renders him unfit to serve as president again.

    Even this distancing from Fuentes (if not Trump) comes as House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, the putative next speaker, is poised to restore prominent committee assignments for Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, two House Republicans who have publicly associated with Fuentes. It also comes as Republican officials, including McCarthy and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, are locking arms in support of Elon Musk’s push to allow extremist voices more access to Twitter.

    Although it took days to develop, some believe the widespread Republican criticism of Trump’s meeting could signal a new determination to restore the barriers between mainstream conservatism and far-right Christian and white nationalism that eroded during the Trump era.

    Brian Klass: The Trump apocalypse has not been canceled

    Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under Trump who focused on domestic extremism, told me she believes the backlash—however belated—combined with the GOP’s disappointing performance in last month’s midterm elections, could mark a turning point. “I think we are going to be playing footsie with fascism and authoritarianism and extremism for a while,” because it helped Trump win the presidency in 2016 and sustain his support thereafter, she said. But, she added, after several years of feeling “very pessimistic” about the prospect of weakening those movements, “this is the first time I’ve felt there might be some light at the end of the tunnel.”

    Yet others remain unconvinced that the GOP is ready to fundamentally break with Trump or ostracize the coalition’s overtly racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic white supremacists and Christian nationalists. “I think what we are looking at is the entrenchment of extremism, and that’s what is so worrisome,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, told me.

    If anything, extremist groups could gain momentum in the coming months. Musk’s proposed mass amnesty for banned Twitter accounts would provide “a tremendous amount of oxygen to extremists on the radical right” and allow those groups to push back much harder against any Republican elected officials resisting their presence in the party, Michael Edison Hayden of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project told me. If Musk opens the door to extremist organizing on Twitter, Hayden said, the white-nationalist presence in the GOP coalition will become “potentially irreversible in the short term.”

    Trump famously declared that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the neo-Nazi riot against the removal of confederate monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia, during his first year in office. Asked to denounce the extremist Proud Boys during one 2020 presidential debate, Trump instead told them to “stand back and stand by.” After the January 6 insurrection, in which white-supremacist groups played a central role, the overwhelming majority of House and Senate Republicans voted against impeaching or convicting Trump for spurring the violence. More recently, hardly any Republicans have raised objections to Trump repeatedly floating the possibility of providing mass pardons (and even government apologies) to the insurrectionists if he wins the presidency again in 2024.

    Other officials inside the GOP coalition have pushed through the boundaries Trump has weakened. Gosar and Greene both appeared at Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference. So did Republican Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers, who called the audience at one of the events “patriot,” and declared, “We need to build more gallows. If we try some of these high-level criminals, convict them, and use a newly built set of gallows, it’ll make an example of these traitors who have betrayed our country.”

    The Republican-controlled Arizona State Senate censured Rogers this year for threatening her colleagues, but she was nevertheless fulsomely embraced by Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor this year. Other prominent GOP candidates, including Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, also associated with white and Christian nationalists or directly echoed themes from those movements this year.

    In a similar vein, in the days before the election, McCarthy made clear that he would restore committee assignments to Greene and Gosar, whom the Democratic majority had stripped of such roles for their association with extremists and embrace of violent imagery. McCarthy also promised Greene and other hardline conservatives that he would authorize an investigation into the government’s prosecution and treatment of the January 6 insurrectionists, many of whom are extremists tied to white and Christian nationalism.

    “After Trump’s rise, these barriers became softer and softer, and they really broke down in the aftermath of January 6 altogether,” Hayden said. “And now you have this kind of opening between the fringe world and the mainstream world in a way that is very difficult to separate.”

    Musk has quickly become a major new factor in further razing those barriers between the far right and the conservative mainstream, restoring the Twitter accounts of figures banned for misinformation, promotion of violence, or intimidation—including Trump and Greene. Hayden said the Southern Poverty Law Center’s research shows that some previously banned white nationalists have already been restored to the site.

    In a torrent of combative posts, Musk wrapped himself in the mantle of “free speech” to justify restoring accounts previously banned for violating the site’s standards. And he’s accused individuals and institutions that argue for drawing a line against extremist rhetoric of threatening the core American value of free expression. In Musk’s formulation, even the most noxious forms of hate speech can be justified as free speech, and any effort to combat divisive rhetoric is an un-American attempt at censorship or intimidation by the “woke” mob. “This is a battle for the future of civilization,” Musk insisted in one tweet. “If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.” That’s quite a minuet: According to Musk’s logic, it’s a form of “tyranny” to oppose his amplification of authoritarian, racist, and neo-Nazi views antithetical to democracy.

    The rush of GOP leaders such as McCarthy, DeSantis, and incoming House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan to support Musk as he works to restore more banned accounts shows how hard it will be for the GOP to completely divorce itself from white and Christian nationalism. So does McCarthy’s pledge to restore committee assignments to Greene and Gosar, as well as the reluctance of almost all GOP officials to directly criticize Trump.

    Polling by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center has found that only about one in 11 Republicans express directly favorable views of white-nationalist groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers (whose leader, Stewart Rhodes, was convicted this week of seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 attack).

    But a much larger slice of Republican partisans express views that might be called white-nationalist adjacent. In various polls, preponderant majorities of GOP voters have said that discrimination against white people is now as big a problem as bias against minorities, that Christianity in the U.S. is under assault, and that the growing number of immigrants threatens American values and traditions. About half of Republicans have expressed agreement in other polls with tenets of white nationalism, including the racist “replacement theory” that elites are importing immigrants to undermine the political power of native-born white people, the core Christian-nationalist belief that “God intended America to be a new promised land,” and the assertion that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”

    Only a minuscule percentage of those Republican partisans might contemplate violence or join extremist organizations, Neumann and other experts point out. But the receptivity of so many Republican voters to arguments, even if less virulent, that overlap with those championed by white- and Christian-nationalist organizations may be a crucial reason for party leaders’ reluctance to confront Trump and others, like Greene, who have associated with such groups. Given the extent of such views inside the GOP coalition, Neumann said, Republicans feel no political incentive to reject the far right “other than out of the goodness of their heart and moral clarity. And apparently that wasn’t enough.”

    Neumann, now the chief strategy officer of Moonshot, a company that combats online extremism, worries that organized far-right violence could still erupt if Trump ever faces a trial as a result of the various investigations targeting him. But she sees the possibility that the visibility and influence of the extreme right inside the GOP peaked with this fall’s converging events, especially the party’s disappointing election results. “I really do think this is, like, a 10-, 20-year process,” she told me, but “I have a slight hope that this sticks and that we move past it.”

    David Frum: A ploy, not a principle

    Robert P. Jones, the president and founder of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute and the author of White Too Long, a history of Christian nationalism, is less optimistic. He believes Christian-nationalist beliefs are spreading more widely among Trump’s followers because they believe “they are at a kind of ‘last stand’ moment” for their vision of a white-Christian-dominated America. “The unwillingness of party leaders, time and time again, to denounce Trump for giving these voices support and cover has allowed them to move into the center of the GOP today,” Jones wrote to me in an email. “I would be surprised if we didn’t see increasing numbers of GOP party leaders openly associating with these voices in the future, particularly leading up to the 2024 presidential election.”

    Greenblatt is also less sanguine. The Anti-Defamation League tracked more than 2,700 anti-Semitic incidents in 2021—the highest annual total it has ever recorded and triple the number of incidents it documented as recently as 2015, the last year before Trump emerged as the GOP’s leading man. Furthermore, Greenblatt is unconvinced that the current Republican distancing from Trump will last any longer than it did in earlier episodes, such as Charlottesville. And he worries that Musk is on course to radically increase the volume of racist and anti-Semitic hate speech on Twitter, which was already a problem before Musk bought the company.

    On all of these fronts, Greenblatt sees what he calls “the normalization of extremism” hardening in ways that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. “Society itself is at risk if we don’t finally move the extremists … out of the mainstream, back to the margins where they belong,” he told me. “I think we don’t realize the peril that we run, the risk that’s upon us, if we don’t get this right.”

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Jefferson Council Appoints Bacon as Executive Director

    Jefferson Council Appoints Bacon as Executive Director

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    Alumni group gears up campaign to promote Jeffersonian tradition, free speech, intellectual diversity at the University of Virginia.

    Press Release
    –

    Nov 21, 2022 08:00 EST


    CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., November 21, 2022 (Newswire.com)
    –
    The Jefferson Council, an alumni association devoted to upholding the Jeffersonian legacy at the University of Virginia, has appointed James A. Bacon Jr. as executive director.

    “The hiring of a full-time director manager is a milestone in the evolution of the Jefferson Council from an all-volunteer group to a professionally staffed organization,” said President Bert Ellis. “The appointment will position the Council to ramp up its activities in support of the longstanding Jeffersonian traditions of civility, honor, free speech and the open exchange of ideas.”

    Bacon is the perfect individual to manage the day-to-day operations of the Council, Ellis said. “As a university alumnus, a life-long Virginia journalist, including 16 years as editor and publisher of Virginia Business magazine and then founder of the Bacon’s Rebellion public policy blog, Bacon has a depth of knowledge of UVa’s challenges that few can match.”

    Founded two years ago, the Jefferson Council is one of the first alumni associations in the United States to organize in response to the rise of ideological intolerance and suppression of free speech on college campuses. It is one of five founding members of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, and a leader in the alumni rebellion sweeping the United States. 

    “We want UVa to be open and welcoming to everyone, but we believe that demographic diversity should be accompanied by free speech, free expression and intellectual diversity,” Bacon said. “We share Thomas Jefferson’s vision of UVa as an institution based upon ‘the illimitable freedom of the human mind’ where ‘we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.’”

    “We envision UVa as a place where ideas collide and diverse viewpoints contend,” Bacon said. “Building upon our rich history, our Honor Code, and world-heritage architecture, we aspire to make UVa the most intellectually vibrant university in the United States, if not the world.” 

    Bacon’s priorities as executive director will be (1) to locate a Charlottesville office and flesh out the Council organization, (2) build a coalition of groups that share the desire for political and ideological pluralism on the grounds, and (3) create an alternative source of news and commentary about governance and culture at the university.

    Source: The Jefferson Council

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  • Physicians for Informed Consent Challenges the Basis for COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates

    Physicians for Informed Consent Challenges the Basis for COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates

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    According to Physicians for Informed Consent, new data raise serious concerns over the risks of hospitalization in people vaccinated with the COVID-19 vaccine.

    Press Release
    –

    Nov 11, 2022 14:01 PST


    NEWPORT BEACH, Calif., November 11, 2022 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Physicians for Informed Consent (PIC) has released an update to its educational document “COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates: 21 Scientific Facts That Challenge the Assumptions.” Developed from data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, National Library of Medicine, and other established sources, the PIC document covers issues of critical importance to both the medical community and the public. Reflecting key scientific research, the document refutes the basis for COVID-19 vaccine mandates. For example, according to Physicians for Informed Consent, studies (referenced here) show: 

    • COVID-19 vaccines may increase the risk of hospitalizations in vaccinated people.

    A study published in Vaccine found that the number of serious adverse events in people vaccinated with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is higher than the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations prevented. For every two COVID-19 hospitalizations prevented in vaccinated people, there are 10 COVID-19 vaccine serious adverse events.

    • COVID-19 vaccines increase the risk of myocarditis in young men.

    A study published in Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety shows that in males aged 18 to 24 years, the risk of myocarditis is 1 in 1,862 after the second dose of a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.

    • COVID-19 vaccines increase the risk of cardiac-related deaths in men.

    A study by the Florida Department of Health found there is a 97% increased risk of cardiac-related deaths in males aged 18-39 within 28 days of being vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine.

    • COVID-19 vaccines increase the length of menstrual cycles in women.

    A study published in BMJ found that in women, vaccination with two doses within the same menstrual cycle leads to a 3.7-day increase in that cycle’s length. The consequences of this phenomenon are not known.

    It can take months or even years for new data to reach the general medical community. As such, some healthcare providers may be unaware of COVID-19 vaccine facts and figures. In providing this document, PIC highlights important statistics to help medical professionals and their patients more easily assess the risks of the vaccine compared to the risks of COVID-19. In addition, as a nonprofit organization with headquarters in California — where AB 2098, a doctor-censorship bill, was recently signed into law — PIC asserts that it is now more important than ever for the general public to be able to access science-based COVID-19 analyses. 

    “AB 2098 is immoral and anti-science,” said Dr. Shira Miller, founder and president of Physicians for Informed Consent. “PIC as an organization will continue speaking out and educating the public about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines, and the need to have doctors whose professional opinion hasn’t been censored — because without free speech informed consent is not possible.”

    To read all 21 scientific facts in PIC’s newly released document, visit physiciansforinformedconsent.org/covid-19-vaccines. 

    Source: Physicians for Informed Consent

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  • Why Kanye West And Other Free Speech Advocates Need Bitcoin

    Why Kanye West And Other Free Speech Advocates Need Bitcoin

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    The below is a direct excerpt of Marty’s Bent Issue #1272: “De-banking as an attack on speech.” Sign up for the newsletter here.

    On October 12, Candace Owens made the world aware of the fact that Ye West, more commonly known as Kanye West, had his corporate bank account shut down by JPMorgan Chase. This move is seemingly a reaction to comments Ye made over the weekend on social media. I have to concur with what Owens says in the second tweet above. I do not care what you think about Ye, but I do care about what you think of one of the largest banks in the world abruptly rug-pulling his multibillion-dollar company’s bank account.

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    Marty Bent

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  • Physicians for Informed Consent Sues Medical Board of California, Argues Board is Violating the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution

    Physicians for Informed Consent Sues Medical Board of California, Argues Board is Violating the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution

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    Federal Court hearing will determine if Medical Board of California can continue what PIC calls “prosecuting scientific dissent as so-called ‘misinformation’”

    Press Release
    –

    Aug 16, 2022


    NEWPORT BEACH, Calif., August 16, 2022 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Physicians for Informed Consent (PIC), an educational nonprofit organization focused on science and statistics, has filed a First Amendment free speech lawsuit (No. 2:22-cv-01203-JAM-KJN) and a motion for a preliminary injunction against the Medical Board of California in order to protect the free speech of all physicians in California.

    The Physicians for Informed Consent lawsuit argues that the Medical Board has weaponized the phrase “misinformation” to unconstitutionally target dissenting physicians, including by “attempting to intimidate by investigation, censor and sanction physicians who publicly disagree with the government’s ever-evolving, erratic, and contradictory public health Covid-19 edicts.”

    Mr. Rick Jaffe, the litigator for this Physicians for Informed Consent lawsuit, structured the legal arguments to emphasize that 75 years of judicial precedent have established that licensing agencies cannot sanction, prosecute or even investigate physicians for speaking out in public about a matter of public concern, regardless of the content, the expressed view point, and even if those views are contrary to the opinions of the “medical establishment.”

    As an example of the Medical Board’s alleged targeting of scientific dissent, the First Amended Complaint refers to the following statement in the Medical Board’s February 10-11 Meeting minutes:

    “Ms. Lawson stated it is the duty of the board to protect the public from misinformation and disinformation by physicians, noting the increase in the dissemination of healthcare related misinformation and disinformation on social media platforms, in the media, and online, putting patient lives at risk in causing unnecessary strain on the healthcare system.”

    This Physicians for Informed Consent lawsuit also examines California Assembly Bill 2098 (AB 2098), which aims to censor so-called “misinformation” spoken by physicians to their patients, to the extent that the bill is irreparably vague. As PIC General Counsel Greg Glaser explained in his declaration filed in court on Aug. 9, 2022:

    “From my perspective, the Board’s standard for misinformation is so hopelessly vague, it is impossible for me to advise my client PIC whether the Board will arbitrarily prosecute PIC for content on the attachment (‘COVID-19 VACCINE MANDATES: 20 Scientific Facts That Challenge the Assumptions‘) even though such PIC content is factual and meticulously cited.”

    The scheduled hearing on PIC’s motion for preliminary injunction is Sept. 27, 2022. The judge assigned to the case is the Honorable John A. Mendez. PIC has requested Judge Mendez issue a preliminary injunction that “the Board be ordered to stop all its investigations of physicians for protected free speech, including but not limited to the public expression of views about the pandemic, the mandates, vaccines, treatments or any other content relating to the pandemic.”

    Make a contribution to Physicians for Informed Consent here: physiciansforinformedconsent.org/donate.

    Press contact:
    info@picphysicians.org
    (925) 642-6651

    Source: Physicians for Informed Consent

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