Cracks in the Ivory Tower (& other reasons for hope in 2025), AI regulation, my talk with Spiked, & more!
Bringing you the latest free speech news (1/5/2025)
Story of the week
There’s Cause for Optimism on Campus Free Speech (The Dispatch) by me
But perhaps the most promising development this year has been the shattering of academia’s illusion of invulnerability. For too long, higher education has fancied itself untouchable and irreplaceable, but it’s beginning to recognize that neither of these assumptions are true. For one thing, experiments like the University of Austin show that where there’s a will for a totally different structure and approach to higher education, there is also a way. I suspect many more scrappy startups like UATX will pop up in the coming years, and if our legacy institutions don’t start shaping up, they may end up losing their dominance faster than they think.
This week in ERI
International free speech stories of the week
Kenya’s president promises to stop abductions following wave of disappearances (CNN) by Larry Madowo
Ruto, his government officials and police have maintained for months that there were no abductions. Ruto has also demanded names of the missing from families, and told parliament that the reports were fabricated to tarnish his government’s name. At least 82 government critics have allegedly gone missing after a youth-led protest movement erupted in June against a controversial finance bill, though some have resurfaced.
Mumbai: Muslim Groups Call For Renewal Of Ban On 'Satanic Verses' Amid Debate (Free Press Journal)
London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup
The federal court in the Western District of Tennessee preliminarily enjoined as unconstitutional the state’s law that allows for criminal charges against websites if more than one-third of their content is “material harmful to minors” and they fail to force users to upload a government ID, scan their face, or otherwise verify their age and identity. The court held plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their First Amendment challenge because “[c]onsistent with decades of Supreme Court precedent,” as “a content-based restriction on protected adult speech,” the statute is subject to strict scrutiny, which “few laws will survive,” and Tennessee’s “is not one of those few.” It held the law is not narrowly tailored to the state’s interest in protecting minors from harmful online content because the law exceeds that in reaching (among other things) material that may be merely “inappropriate for minors,” while “[i]gnoring the realities of the internet” in effectively excluding the same content if it appears on, for example, social media that minors tend to consume, rather than on an adult website. The law is also not the least restrictive means of advancing Tennessee’s interest in protecting minors from pornography, given “[b]locking and filtering controls on individual devices are both more effective and less restrictive than the State’s suppression of speech at the source.” With oral argument around the corner in the Supreme Court’s review of the Fifth Circuit upholding Texas’ online adult-content age-verification regime – a decision FIRE argued relied on “strained reinvention” of settled Supreme Court precedent – the Western District of Tennessee’s decision faithfully applying prevailing law stands as an important and refreshing counterpoint. (Fellow First Amendment Lawyers Association members Gill Sperlein, Jeff Sandman and Ed Bearman served as FSC’s counsel in the case.)
Interview of the month
While across the pond for the Battle of Ideas Festival, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Spiked’s Fraser Myers to talk about the state of free speech in both the US and the UK.
This is an absolutely genuine question, but, Ummm. How is what UATX doing remotely innovative? It was hard to discern how it’s not merely repackaging a 2+ Major BA from a good liberal arts school as something cool & different.
So, like, for instance: Learning the difference between knowledge and wisdom?
Yo.
Isn’t this Philosophy 101 - General Credit? If you haven’t had to struggle through that issue extensively by the time you get done with Aristotle, well, you haven’t been doing your homework assignments.
Similarly, small class sizes?
Uhhh. Yeah. That’s another thing liberal arts colleges sell themselves on. e.g., my recollection is that average class size at my college was 5 or less students. And terminal degrees in the faculty? It’s pretty much always 100%.
Liberal arts: I went in as a creative type & afraid of math. And I came out doing hardcore calculations way better than most, while also being creative — understanding that when we tell ourselves & others that they either lean left brain or right brain, we are telling a disempowering lie.
Liberal arts teaches you to be both. Or you missed the God Damned point.
Then, after having been at one of these lowly ranked liberal arts schools, I crushed all the requirements to go to an ultra elite law school on the east coast.
And that’s where I learned stupid shit, like, there are minor economic inefficiencies in the tort system. So we should all become communists.
I think the problem is group think.
And the answer is anything that teaches you to burn through the bullshit.
Kindle can do that too.
It’s worth adding this potshot that happens to be incredibly true: The dumbest lawyers I know are tenured professors at elite law schools. They create notoriety for themselves for taking stupid positions and defending their absurdities relentlessly. That’s often what attracts attention. Not, you know, being thoughtful and willing to listen.
I dunno. Life. Just life. If you pay attention in life, you tend to see that the elite schools offer you a few things: (A) Friendships that can be very valuable to you in your professional life, (B) A strong brand that people think represents excellence, and (C) A pretty shitty education offered by professors that don’t actually want to teach you.
It’s all about the brand and maintaining the revenue generation machine. But it might actually be worth the terrible education if you are a self-starter because the network you create in those years can be differentiating. However, don’t think for a second that you are smarter or better than someone else because of how effective your school is at branding itself.
Because then you are buying the bullshit.
Just FYI, "Cracks in the Ivory Tower" is the title of a book by Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness. I bet you'd like it.