HAVE GUN, WILL…BE FORCED TO JUSTIFY IT TO COLLEGE BUREAUCRATS: Anand Venigalla is a Long Island University student who posted pictures of a trip to Cabela’s on Facebook, prompting LIU to drag him in and grill him about whether he had violent intentions. Take a look at the pics and judge for yourself. From the look of it, King George III might have something to worry about if Venigalla gets his hands on a time machine, but that’s about it. Feel free to drop a (polite) line to LIU letting ’em know how you feel.

HARVARD STUDENTS FILE TITLE IX CLAIMS AGAINST BRETT KAVANAUGH: “It would be pretty terrifying for any survivor or any person to walk into a building on campus and see someone who has been alleged of a very serious crime,” says one student. Title IX, as currently interpreted, has all kinds of issues.

“HARVARD NEEDS A CIVICS LESSON.” Truer words have never been spoken. If Harvard puts you on its “blacklist” for your alleged ties to unsavory groups like, uh, sororities, let us at FIRE know.

GREG LUKIANOFF AND JONATHAN HAIDT’S ‘THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND’ OUT TODAY: Their new book is #12 on all of Amazon as I write, with positive comments from everyone from Niall Ferguson to Michael Bloomberg to Cornel West. Pick up a copy, and look out for Greg and Jon on book tour, as they may be coming to a venue near you.

UCSB SEX MISCONDUCT CASE GETS CALIFORNIA REGENTS FOUND IN CONTEMPT OF COURT: UC Santa Barbara apparently thought the law didn’t apply to it. Turns out it did. Were I a California regent, I’d be furious that my subordinates’ lawlessness put my name on the bad side of a contempt proceeding.

PROBLEMS? WHAT PROBLEMS? A former Department of Education employee says “Don’t Believe Betsy DeVos. Title IX Already Has a Fair Process for Students Accused of Sexual Assault.” Just not at any of America’s top 53 universities, apparently.

CAMPUS CENSORSHIP? MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Is there another area of civil rights in which academics will point to hundreds (upon hundreds) of documented incidents and yet happily tell you it’s no big deal because, hey, think of all the people whose rights haven’t been violated?

INFOWARS BANNED BY APPLE, FACEBOOK, YOUTUBE, SPOTIFY, ALL WITHIN 24 HOURS: Lesson one in undermining conspiracy theorists is not doing stuff to them that looks a whole lot like a conspiracy.

DEMANDING REPRESSION: People on social media are flipping out about this Mark Zuckerberg interview, in which he expresses reluctance to blanket-censor Holocaust deniers on Facebook. Do they really want a giant corporation deciding what details of the Holocaust (or any other historical event) are accurate, and punishing those who disagree? That sounds like a nightmare — both for the social media giants and for us.

U. OF KANSAS CAVES, AGREES TO REMOVE FLAG-BASED ART: Seems like a pretty obvious First Amendment violation. It’s odd, isn’t it, how quickly universities tend to give in when the demands are for censorship, but fight tooth and nail against free speech?

VICTORY FOR ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN WISCONSIN: The Wisconsin Supreme Court delivers a fantastic victory for Marquette professor John McAdams, who blogged his criticism of in-class censorship by a grad student instructor and was fired by Marquette despite its promises of academic freedom.

GOADING TWITTER TO SELF-DESTRUCT: It’s hard to read this article by Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times as anything other than an attempt to goad Twitter into shutting down President Trump’s account. This is madness. Not only would this ultimately destroy Twitter, the explosion of both private and government regulation to follow would likely take a large part of Internet freedom with it.

PURDUE PROMISES FREE SPEECH, DELIVERS: It will not punish a professor for a two-year-old post of a 42-year-old picture of herself as a child dressed in blackface, correctly noting that such a post is not harassment.

ONE IS STILL FOR ALL: Panicked by extremism on the right and the left, too many of our thought leaders and institutions are apologizing for, or even turning away from, supporting free speech and the First Amendment. For the Fourth, FIRE wants to unapologetically remind Americans that free speech is, and has to be, for everyone—not just the folks we like.

“THE IGNORANT DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO AN AUDIENCE:” It’s possible that this op-ed by philosophy professor Bryan W. Van Norden in today’s New York Times is a parody. If it’s not, we have to assume that he thinks Herbert Marcuse’s infamous essay “Repressive Tolerance” represents a credible authority to which to appeal when discussing free speech, that readers won’t notice that he assumes his own totally unwarranted infallibility while criticizing J.S. Mill for pointing out the problems in doing just that, and that as “a professor of philosophy at Wuhan University” and therefore an employee of the Chinese Communist government, he and those like him would certainly be among those most likely to be denied a platform if the U.S. government had the power to do so.

STUDENTS SEEM TO BELIEVE THIS IS STILL AMERICA: A huge new FIRE survey, conducted by YouGov, indicates overwhelming support among students for due process protections on campus. For example, a whopping 85% seem to believe that they should be presumed innocent until proven guilty (the cheek!), yet a FIRE report on policies at the top 53 schools last year discovered that only 30% of them bothered to guarantee students this extremely basic right in campus proceedings. It might be too much to expect every college to hit Learned Hand levels of jurisprudence, but this Keyrock-level stuff should be plenty achievable.

STATEMENT DRAFTED BY HARVARD’S DEPARTMENT OF CHUTZPAH: Harvard emailed its alumni today (subject line: “Defending Diversity”) warning them that those bringing a lawsuit charging the college with discriminating against Asian Americans will “seek to paint an unfamiliar and inaccurate image of our community,” by making claims that, in Harvard’s opinion, “rely on misleading, selectively presented data taken out of context.” Apparently that’s bad when it happens to Harvard administrators, though not so much when Harvard does it to its own students.

AT SYRACUSE, TRUTH IS FAR LESS IMPORTANT THAN POLITICS: In the Washington Post, Syracuse law professor Greg Germain points out that the supposedly bigoted and racist language used by members of a fraternity suspended after video of a satirical roast got out was, uh, satirical:

A diverse group of 15 students (white, African American, Hispanic, Jewish, Muslim, Christian) who were pledging an engineering fraternity were asked to do a roast of the fraternity members for their joint amusement. The skits were crude: masturbation jokes; a politically conservative member was made to be an alt-right bigot who formed a competing fraternity to spread racism; a skit about sexually assaulting a fraternity member who was so controlled by his girlfriend that he could not move (patterned after a viral Brandon Rogers YouTube video). They were making fun of themselves and each other in outlandish ways using very crude language.

And Syracuse knew this perfectly well before it ruined these would-be engineers’ educational plans (and perhaps careers) for nothing. Take this example, from the affidavit of a black student that was filed in the suspended students’ lawsuit against Syracuse:

7. The second skit, entitled “The Trilogies of Tri Kappa,” was based on a satirical fraternity headed by a racist who was trying to integrate members of his “once great” fraternity to “his newly formed white empire.” This imaginary fraternity known as Tri Kappa was the “main enemy” of Theta Tau. This story was intended to lampoon one Chapter member who was a known supporter of President Trump and a political conservative.

8. The main character in the story was presented by the new member portraying him as a red neck, “back woods” figure, who forced his pledges to undergo an “anointing” by taking an oath to “always have hate in [his] heart” for “niggers,” “spics” and the “fuckin’ kikes.” The new member portraying the “pledge” taking the oath in the skit was Jewish. It was evident to everyone in attendance who knew the individuals involved and referenced in the story how ridiculous and satirical it was for one member to be portrayed as a rabid racist in our Chapter which had twenty eight members with racial, ethnic and religious minority backgrounds, including me and other African American and Hispanic members. Although I did not participate in this skit, I observed it and laughed along with everyone else because it was exaggerated satire showing the ignorance and absurdity of actual racists.

To be clear, not only did Syracuse punish these students for “offensive” speech despite promising them free speech (which is wrong), it stripped them of their educations for allegedly saying the exact opposite of what they were saying (which is both wrong and cruel). If you’d like to exercise your right to free speech and let Syracuse know your opinion about the situation, I know the students would appreciate the support.

GIANT INTERNET COMPANY SWEARS OFF CENSORSHIP, TAKES HITS FROM MEDIA: In a thoughtful blog post, the dominant Steam gaming marketplace announces that it is getting out of the censorship business, saying, “If you’re a player, we shouldn’t be choosing for you what content you can or can’t buy.” Great news for freedom lovers, but some game journalists and developers don’t like it. A Kotaku writer called the decision “irresponsible” and quotes, among others, a “developer of queer sex games” whose problems with getting racy games on Steam will now be over, but who opposes the decision because it means the platform is “picking bad moral norms.” This, despite the fact that it was the imposition of others’ moral norms that caused his problems in the first place.

CAMPUS’ WAR ON FREE SPEECH CLAIMS 16 STUDENT VICTIMS: Have you ever attended, participated in, or, like millions of Americans, watched a “roast” on TV? Maybe even found it funny? Well, you loathsome degenerate, you had better stay far, far away from Syracuse University, which suspended 16 students for 1 to 2 years(!) for roasting their fraternity brothers – in private, and with zero complaints filed by the roast-ees – after someone posted out-of-context video on Facebook several weeks later. What the students said sounds bad. But the more you look into this situation, the worse Syracuse looks, and the angrier you will get. If you’d like to help these students out by expressing your own thoughts to Syracuse (which literally has the First Amendment written in giant letters on the side of a building, for crying out loud), FIRE has made it easy.

OHHH THEY HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE: And that’s enough for the University of Denver to suspend a female undergrad for her alleged use of racial slurs and other expression, despite 11 out of 12 witnesses (12 witnesses? For this?) saying they never actually heard her say any of them, but that they heard someone else say she said it. One wonders if her alleged expression of sentiments such as “we don’t care about that minority bullshit” might have had more to do with this abomination of due process, which included an administrator driving the accused student to tears.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, JUST MAKING STUFF UP EDITION: The increasingly absurd Marquette University has reportedly banned “proselytizing” on its campus, but if you think that means “inducing someone to convert to your faith,” slow down, Captain Dictionary. In other news, Marquette has also determined that objects moving in the approximate direction of a vector originating at the center of the earth and aiming outward into space shall be described as “falling,” because why not?

ANOTHER “FREE SPEECH: WHO NEEDS IT?” HOT TAKE: A professor at Mizzou argues in the Washington Post that there is no good reason private colleges should have to let the KKK or [insert your preferred cultural bogey] come to their campuses. How about “because they said they would?” He also admits that “some cases will be more difficult to resolve than the not-so-hypothetical Nazi marches, Klan rallies, and cross burnings that many readers will find impossible to defend.” Given the actual number of such events on campuses (Have I missed a recent spate of campus cross burnings?) his “some cases” would more usefully be phrased as “practically every case.”

CAMPUS CHRONICLES, LACK OF SELF-AWARENESS EDITION: A college president takes FIRE to task for classifying bans on “verbal abuse” (like this, perhaps?) and “posters promoting alcohol consumption” as speech codes. The “scourge of excessive alcohol consumption,” he feels, particularly makes the latter an example of “imbalanced sensationalism.” Would he similarly defend 1950s- and 60s-era efforts to censor speech that threatened to spread the “scourge of Communism?” The Red Menace was, after all, quite a bit better armed than are the forces of demon rum.

AMERICA’S WORST UNIVERSITY FOR FREE SPEECH: Places like Berkeley or Evergreen State get all the press (and it’s often richly deserved), but as the student journalists at DePaul University’s student newspaper revealed this week, there is an ever-growing list of reasons that FIRE puts DePaul at or near the top of any list of the very worst schools for free speech. The reports we get from DePaul are consistently appalling. Please, stay away from there.