\n<\/p>\n
A free expression lawyer, a university system leader and a civil rights activist were unified in their call to higher ed leaders to \u201cstand up\u201d against violations of First Amendment rights and the stifling of free speech on campuses at the annual meeting of the American Association\u00a0of\u00a0Colleges and Universities in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. <\/p>\n
At the opening plenary, the legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Will Creeley, joined John King, chancellor of the State University of New York, and Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, in condemning institutions that have bent to political pressure. They warned that threats to constitutional rights are no longer a red-state problem. <\/p>\n
\u201cI never thought I\u2019d live in a country where you\u2019d be snatched off the street for writing an op-ed, but that is most definitely our country now,\u201d Creeley said, referring to the 2025 arrest and detention of R\u00fcmeysa \u00d6zt\u00fcrk, a Turkish international student studying at Tufts University. <\/p>\n
Without naming the University of Arkansas or the professor directly, Creeley said it was \u201cgalling\u201d that an institution \u201crolled over\u201d when conservative politicians pressured it to rescind an offer to a law school dean\u2014presumably Emily Suski\u2014after discovering she signed an amicus brief in support of transgender athletes.<\/p>\n
\u201cToo often that kind of expedient capitulation, that kind of quiet cowardice, is seen as the easiest way to get through it,\u201d he said. \u201cFolks, I don\u2019t think that\u2019s going to work. We\u2019ve got a serious challenge here. The time is now for institutions to stand up and fight.\u201d<\/p>\n
King acknowledged his \u201cplace of privilege\u201d heading a public institution system under a Democratic governor, but he urged leaders in Republican-led states not to compromise their values. <\/p>\n
\u201cI have to say, in my view, some folks in leadership roles across the higher education sector have lost their sense of where the line is, and they are complicit in a dismantling, not only of core values in higher education, but frankly of our democracy,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
King also warned against the \u201cchilling effect\u201d the attacks on speech are having on college campuses. \u201cFor people thinking, \u2018I could teach this book but I don\u2019t want to deal with the headache\u2019 or \u2018I could ask students to debate this question, but I think it could get out of hand and I don\u2019t want to do it\u2019\u2014that day-to-day creeping fear is diminishing the quality of discourse on campuses,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd that is not just a red-state issue. That is a purple-state, blue-state issue that\u2019s happening all over, and it\u2019s very dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wiley, who has also served as a faculty member and senior vice president for social justice at the New School, suggested institutions take inspiration from the strategic planning behind the civil rights protests of the 1960s by creating courses and syllabi that would provoke \u201cconflict-based constructive engagement,\u201d including litigation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s an opportunity to understand our power where we\u2019re willing to figure out a play and relationships to have the conflict-based constructive engagement because, in this period, there is no winning without conflict,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Both Wiley and Creeley called for greater coalition-building across colleges to respond to the attacks on the entire sector. For his part, King praised what he saw as greater cross-institutional collaboration to rebuild trust in higher ed, but he said institutions should be careful to avoid the \u201cunforced errors\u201d they made after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat handed opponents of higher education the ability to structure this attack,\u201d he said, calling for clear, content-neutral time, place and manner restrictions for student protests. \u201cThose kinds of reasonable things were not necessarily communicated, were not necessarily enforced and the chaos that resulted became an opportunity for enemies of higher education to have a basis for attack,\u201d he added. \u201cWe have to be very disciplined about that.\u201d <\/p>\n
In response to a question from the audience about increased surveillance of faculty and students online, Creeley said students in Oklahoma and Texas \u201cmanufactured outrage and made-for-TV moments\u201d when they complained about a grade on an essay referencing the Bible and secretly recorded a confrontation with a professor who used the word \u201cgender\u201d in their classroom, respectively. <\/p>\n
\u201c[These incidents are] manufactured to go viral\u2014a culture war sugar rush for all kinds of media outlets. To the extent you can prepare your educators for that\u00a0\u2026 I think is for the better.\u201d <\/p>\n
Correction: King used the word “chaos” not “payoff” to describe the student protests after Oct. 7.<\/em> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A free expression lawyer, a university system leader and a civil rights activist were unified in their call to higher ed leaders to \u201cstand up\u201d against violations of First Amendment rights and the stifling of free speech on campuses at the annual meeting of the American Association\u00a0of\u00a0Colleges and Universities in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. At<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42628,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[1839,558,495,791,322],"class_list":{"0":"post-42627","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-attacks","9":"tag-government","10":"tag-higher","11":"tag-stand","12":"tag-urged"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}