The Fall semester is not going well so far when it comes to campus speech. Obviously the most horrible event in this regard was the murder of Charlie Kirk while he was engaged in a public speaking event on a university campus. A few years ago there were numerous instances of mobs of students and agitators disrupting conservative speakers and rioting when conservative speakers came to a college campus. The pace of such mob activity seemed to have slowed, but the Kirk shooting is a terrible escalation.
Unfortunately, the Kirk shooting is not the only news on the campus speech front. In just the past few days, I have written two pieces for the Chronicle of Higher Education on moves to fire professors for speech that has drawn the ire of politicians.
The first responded on events at Texas A&M University, where an English lecturer was quickly fired after a viral video promulgated by a Republican state legislator. The video shows a confrontation in a class on children's literature in which a student objected to the professor presenting materials on gender identity. The university president initially defended the instructor and her academic freedom, until the Texas governor started demanding that she be fired.
