“I can’t believe American is investigating us for having a frank discussion about abortion access,” he said in a statement released by FIRE. American cannot let its process for investigating actual discrimination and harassment be weaponized to investigate students’ opinions, but that’s exactly what’s happening.” One of the accused students, Daniel Brezina, was similarly incredulous. “There’s nothing even approaching harassment or discrimination in the chat. On many campuses, when administrators have infringed on faculty or student rights, professors-especially law professors steeped in First Amendment law-have been unafraid to speak up.Ĭonor Friedersdorf: Professors need the power to fire diversity bureaucratsĪ spokesperson at American argued in an email to me that universities are legally required to review all discririmination complaints and added that “during the fact-finding process, no adverse action is taken by the university against any individuals.” He went on to say that American’s Office of Equity and Title IX “reviews only those matters related to a viable claim of discrimination and does not investigate matters related solely to disagreements based in speech.”īut Alex Morey, a FIRE attorney who wrote to the university on the accused students’ behalf, lambasted American’s approach.
Faculty members are more likely than bureaucrats to understand that free speech is essential to academic freedom.
Administrators and DEI officials can, of course, be disciplined or fired by higher-ranking university bureaucrats, but they are essentially unaccountable to the scholars and students whose expression they are stifling.
If professors-or perhaps representatives chosen by professors-could sanction and, in extreme cases, terminate anyone who violates First Amendment rights or free-expression policies, administrators would have a powerful new incentive to avoid speech-chilling excesses. That’s why, last month, I proposed a way to rein in such investigations: Universities should empower their faculty to check administrators and DEI staffers who undermine freedom of speech. Some of the most easily offended university students in America have become adept at characterizing any speech they dislike as if it creates an unsafe, discriminatory, or hostile climate, or else constitutes harassment or even violence and many of the accused find that being investigated in such cases is a punishment in itself. Then the Office of Equity and Title IX at American sent a formal letter to eight students alerting them that all were under investigation for allegedly harassing a classmate on the basis of his political affiliation and religious beliefs, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a free-speech-advocacy group that took up the accused students’ cause.Ĭonor Friedersdorf: Why I cover campus controversiesĬases like this underscore the problem with administrators, often operating within or in conjunction with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies, who investigate speech on behalf of any complaining party no matter how weak their underlying claims. Instead, the offended Republican student filed a harassment complaint. On a campus that adequately valued students’ free speech, that’s where the matter would have ended, with everyone having expressed their opinion. “I find it interesting how the call to silence our personal opinions happens after I defended my deeply-held religious beliefs and yet nobody has mentioned that same sentiment about the pro-abortion posts.” The discussion was “deeply offensive to both me and my Greek Orthodox faith,” he declared. “ Griswold? Obergefell? Loving?”Ī classmate replied, “As a Republican, I find it insulting that conservatives would be thought of as overturning people’s civil rights.” After another classmate interjected, “Can we shut the fuck up about personal opinions while people process this?” the Republican student responded. “What are they going to go after next?” the student wrote. One student fretted about whether conservatives would overturn other precedents conferring rights to buy contraception, or to marry a partner of the same sex or of a different race. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked, prompting numerous law students at American to join an online chat about the impending diminution of abortion rights. This matter began in May, shortly after the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. A recent investigation of eight abortion-rights supporters at American University, in Washington, D.C., offers yet more evidence that college administrators and diversity-and-inclusion bureaucrats-some of whom undermine free speech as if their job duties demanded it-need new checks on their power.