It probably doesn’t come as much of a shock to Ricochet readers that America’s most elite colleges and universities are often far from elite where their performance on free speech is concerned. Even so, as we’ve been writing at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) over the last couple of weeks, their cultures of free expression have been showing some signs of seriously ill health. A quick rundown:

• Yale University attracted nationwide scorn this fall for its treatment of a law student, whom it pressured to issue a public apology over an email promoting a social event that made a joking reference to a “trap house.” But as my colleague Adam Goldstein and I wrote recently, another, less ballyhooed incident likewise raises serious concern. Psychiatrist and author Sally Satel delivered a lecture to the psychiatry department at the Yale School of Medicine (where she is a visiting lecturer) discussing the year she spent working in rural Ohio treating people struggling with opioid addiction. Following her lecture, a group of “Concerned Yale Psychiatry Residents” demanded that Satel be stripped of her lecturer title for her “dehumanizing, demeaning, and classist” remarks, seizing upon, of all things, a reference to an “artisanal coffee shop.”
• The Massachusetts Institute of Technology came in for heavy criticism after its department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences rescinded its invitation for University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot to deliver its annual John Carlson Lecture. The reason for Abbot’s disinvitation had nothing whatsoever to do with the scientific nature of his planned lecture; it was because he’d previously published a column criticizing university diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and proposing what he believed to be a fairer alternative. As my colleague Komi German documents, that’s only the most prominent in a string of free expression challenges that has seen MIT stumble.
• Most recently, the Stanford University Undergraduate Senate denied funding to the Stanford College Republicans, who sought to bring former Vice President Mike Pence to campus for a lecture. Audio recordings of the senate’s vote make clear that viewpoint discrimination played a role in the decision. ​​One student senator is recorded saying that “if you’re against the individual speaker, then I think it’s fine to vote in that way.” Or, put differently, it’s perfectly fine to let your personal politics and morality supersede your duty to treat funding requests in a viewpoint-neutral manner.
  

New on ERI: @AdGo & @pebonilla on why a Yale lecturer targeted for her ‘dehumanizing’ comment about coffee in rural Ohio should be a wake-up call for campus leadership. 1/26https://t.co/lYD0QsKxlr

— Greg Lukianoff (@glukianoff) December 6, 2021

At least at MIT, it should be said, a silver lining may be coming into view. Abbot’s disinvitation has galvanized alumni and faculty to push for MIT to strengthen its free expression promises, most prominently through passage of the Chicago Statement on free expression; nearly 150 MIT professors (Noam Chomsky among them) have signed a petition calling for MIT to adopt the statement. It would be a welcome end to an avoidable chapter — and hopefully an inspiration to its peers.

A final note: alumni who are interested in holding their alma maters accountable on free expression should consider joining FIRE’s Alumni Network and consider as well the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, with which FIRE has worked closely since its inception.