Business Wire: “The Chronicle of Higher Education today announced its updated DEI Legislation Tracker, which is following 49 bills in 23 states to restrict efforts to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion and prohibiting colleges from a range of DEI initiatives. Republican politicians in early 2023 launched an assault on colleges’ diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts to recruit… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Free Speech
Protecting Students from Faulty Software and Legislation: 2023 Year in Review
EFF: “Lawmakers, schools districts, educational technology companies and others keep rolling out legislation and software that threatens students’ privacy, free speech, and access to social media, in the name of “protecting” children. At EFF, we fought back against this overreach and demand accountability and transparency. Bad bills and invasive monitoring systems, though sometimes well-meaning, hurt… Continue Reading
International Threats to Freedom of Expression: 2023 Year in Review
EFF: “2023 has been an unfortunate reminder that the right to free expression is most fragile for groups on the margins, and that it can quickly become a casualty during global conflicts. Threats to speech arose out of the ongoing war in Palestine. They surfaced in bills and laws around the world that explicitly restrict… Continue Reading
Read it yourself: All 673 books removed from Orange classrooms
Orlando Sentinel: “These books are among the 673 rejected by Orange County Public Schools this year [read free] for fear they violate a new Florida law that prohibits “sexual conduct” in books available to students. The books were in teachers’ classroom libraries. The books will get another review by OCPS staff, and could be returned… Continue Reading
The lives upended by Florida’s school book wars
Washington Post (read free): “…The battle over what children should be allowed to read in school has riven Florida’s Escambia County School District. It’s part of a national battle, as school book objections surge to historic highs across the country. In Escambia County, the controversy kicked off in 2022, when a high school language arts… Continue Reading
Was it something I said? Legal protections for employee speech
Economic Policy Institute Paper: Executive summary – “At-will” employment is sometimes shorthanded as employers’ rights to fire employees (and employees’ right to quit) for a bad or arbitrary reason, or for no reason at all. Among the bad or arbitrary reasons that employers sometimes fire workers: something the worker said, or something they didn’t say.… Continue Reading
Inside America’s School Internet Censorship Machine
Wired [read free]: “…WIRED requested internet censorship records from 17 public school districts around the US, painting a picture of the widespread digital censorship taking place across the country. Our investigation focuses on Albuquerque Public Schools (APS), one of the largest school districts in the US, which provided the most complete look at its web-filtering… Continue Reading
EU Fundamental Rights Report 2023
European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights Report 2023 reflects on the developments and shortfalls of human rights protection in the EU in 2022. Its focus section covers the fundamental rights implications of the aggression in Ukraine for the EU and the challenges that arose. For example, the EU’s Temporary Protection Directive provided welcome access to… Continue Reading
Human Rights Declined in 3 out of 4 Countries since Global Rule of Law Recession Began in 2016
“The rule of law has once again eroded in a majority of countries this year, according to the World Justice Project (WJP) Rule of Law Index 2023. More than 6 billion people live in a country where the rule of law weakened between 2022 and 2023. Since authoritarian trends pushed the world into a rule… Continue Reading
The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore
Washington Post [read free]: “She loved books. And in a time of spreading book bans in public schools, that’s why this Florida librarian had to quit. It was her last Monday morning in the library, and when Tania Galiñanes walked into her office and saw another box, she told herself that this would be the… Continue Reading
Antisemitism has moved from the right to the left in the US − and falls back on long-standing stereotypes
Via LLRX – Antisemitism has moved from the right to the left in the US − and falls back on long-standing stereotypes – Prof. Arie Perliger, director of the graduate program in Security Studies at the School of Criminology and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell addresses the fact the the U.S. is… Continue Reading
Reading Between the Bars
PEN America Experts Report – Senior Manager, The Freewrite Project; Juliana Luna, Intern, The Freewrite Project. Published October 25, 2023. “…Carceral censorship is the most pervasive form of censorship in the United States. The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and the departments of corrections (DOCs) in all 50 states and the District of Columbia censor… Continue Reading
