ADMINISTRATORS — NOT JUST DEI ADMINISTRATORS — ARE THE BIGGEST THREAT TO FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS

But DEI admins are surely a BIG part of the problem, too:

• After tenured University of Central Florida professor Charles Negy tweeted about racial issues, the school issued a statement signed by the president, provost, and chief equity, inclusion and diversity officer condemning the tweets and opening an investigation into Negy.
• Yale Law’s associate dean of student affairs and director of diversity, equity, and inclusion repeatedly summoned a law student to meetings and pressured him to apologize for sending a lighthearted party invitation that used the term “trap house” because it was considered “pejorative and racist.”
• Loyola University New Orleans repeatedly subjected a professor to investigations and assigned him a DEI coach because of his protected in-class and extramural speech.
• After aUniversity of California, Los Angeles music professor showed his class the 1965 film version of Othello (in which Laurence Olivier wears skin-darkening makeup), a dean reportedly sent a department-wide email saying the professor’s that the incident had been reported to the Office of Equity, Civil Rights, and Title IX.
• Also at UCLA, after a student complained about a professor reading MLK, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which includes racial slurs, UCLA referred the matter to its Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion for review.
• Syracuse University adopted new policies to hold bystanders responsible for “bias-related incidents” and “hate speech.” The chief of diversity and inclusion said that bystanders “can be held accountable,” and directed students to report incidents either to the school’s Office of Equal Opportunity, Inclusion and Resolution Services or anonymously through its bias reporting policy. Requiring bystanders to be speech police is truly worthy of the name Orwellian.
• A University of California System “guidance document” written by its council of chief diversity officers appeared to instruct students and faculty about how they may talk about the coronavirus (e.g., “Do not use terms such as “Chinese Virus.”).
• In 2023, Stanford Law School (my alma mater) students shouted down 5th Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan when he attempted to speak at a student-sponsored event. This was after long meetings with DEI administrators and after a precisely ten minute shout down then-Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach got up and gave a truly cringeworthy seven minute speech wondering if the “juice” of free speech and of having a 5th circuit judge speak to law students was “worth the squeeze.” The Stanford Law School incident earned its own chapter in “Canceling” as demonstrating the full power of the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress.