NYU students (who don't seem to have read Coddling) try to deplatform Haidt, FIRE staff & I answer your questions, And Daddy needs a gunboat! ... for Liberty of course! & more
Bringing you the latest free speech news (5/17/26)
Stories of the week
N.Y.U. Students Object to Speaker Who Calls Their Generation Coddled (NYT) by Jeremy W. Peters & Matthew Haag
On Thursday my friend & co-author Jon Haidt gave the commencement talk at NYU. As I pointed out on X, if it weren’t so depressing it would be comically ironic that a number of students’ first instinct was to immediately prove the premise of The Coddling of the American Mind correct by demanding he be disinvited.
I had the pleasure of joining So to Speak host & FIRE EVP Nico Perrino, COO Alisha Glennon, & Legal Director Will Creeley for a member webinar.
This week in Expression
Growing calls for a federal solution, including from the White House, to fix the fragmented landscape of state regulations reflect a clear political appetite for legislative action. And a single national standard has obvious appeal for an industry seeking consistency across jurisdictions. But consistency isn’t the same as constitutionality. If federal proposals like the GUARD Act replicate the speech restrictions found in state laws, they just hardwire those problems into federal law.
Lawmakers see different threats to campus speech — but the same stakes by Michael Hurley
These points echo a long line of constitutional law, which leaves no room for the view that First Amendment protections should apply with less force on college campuses. Indeed, the Supreme Court warned in its seminal case on academic freedom that teachers and students must remain free to inquire, study, evaluate, and gain new maturity and understanding, or else “our civilization will stagnate and die.”
This week in FIRE’s blog
International free speech stories of the week
Protesters [in Australia] prepare legal challenge over ‘absurd and stupid’ anti-hate speech laws (SBS News)
Met warns about hate speech at Unite the Kingdom and Palestine marches (The Guardian) by Chris Osuh
Lee Seung-hwan awarded damages over abrupt concert cancellation in 2024 (Korea JoongAng Daily) by Cho Mun-Gyu
Lee’s concert had originally been scheduled to take place at the Gumi Culture and Arts Center on Dec. 25, 2024. His agency applied to rent the venue on July 31 that year and received approval.
However, five days before the concert, Mayor Kim demanded that Lee and the head of his agency, Dream Factory Club, sign a written pledge stating that they would not engage in political agitation or remarks that could cause misunderstanding.
Announcement of the week
After FIRE’s staff retreat this past week at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, I’ve unilaterally decided that we’ll be pivoting from defending free speech on land & in the air(waves) to the open seas with a new initiative to purchase a warship in order to fight the pernicious threat of marine censorship!
(But in all seriousness, we got to tour the USS Olympia—the oldest steel American warship still afloat—and I think I fell in love. It’s like a floating battle mansion!)
He goes on and on about deplatforming and the censorship industrial complex... yet haidt afaik supports gating off the internet and other legislation... that the cdt and eff oppose. He only has a half measure if that is true...