Safe Spaces

A federal judge on Friday declined to block the Trump administration from carrying out detention and deportation operations in houses of worship, finding that a coalition of more than two dozen religious organizations had not made a clear case that their spaces and congregants had become common targets.

The ruling stemmed from a lack of clarity about how President Trump’s promised mass deportation campaign has been carried out in practice since he took office...

A federal judge on Friday, April 11, sided with the Trump administration in allowing immigration agents to conduct enforcement operations at houses of worship despite a lawsuit filed by religious groups over the new policy.

U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich in Washington refused to grant a preliminary injunction to the plaintiffs, more than two dozen Christian and Jewish groups representing millions of Americans.

By the time the Class of 2020 started its freshman year in the fall of 2016, the Chicago Principles of Free Expression were emerging as a lodestar for higher education. The University of Chicago had assembled a Committee on Freedom of Expression in mid-2014 to articulate “the University’s overarching commitment to free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation among all members of the University’s community.”

A University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor recently called free speech racist and said he worries that if a Democratic presidential candidate wins the 2020 election it could spark another Civil War.

Eric King Watts, an associate professor of communication studies, made the comments during his keynote speech “Tribalism, Voicelessness, and the Problem of Free Speech” that kicked off a two-day conference on free speech.

“Democracy needs free speech, but it is increasingly vulnerable to its excesses,” Watts said in his speech.

Whatever happened to the idea that colleges and universities were sanctuaries of free speech, where academics and students could vigorously study and debate differing ideas? Why have so many institutions of higher learning—once regarded as bastions of vigorous, honest scholarship, where the search for truth was inviolable—morphed into places of intolerance and rigid ideological conformity? Speakers with “unacceptable” viewpoints are shouted down or even resisted with violence.

Of 22 prominent, politically active individuals who are known to have been suspended [from Twitter] since 2005 and who expressed a preference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 21 supported Donald Trump.

It's hard to think of a more dramatic rebuttal to claims that campus political correctness is a myth than what happened at Columbia University on Friday night.

Comedian Nimesh Patel took his gig at Columbia University’s “cultureSHOCK: Reclaim” event a bit too literally, apparently.

Bad policy and paranoid parenting are making kids too safe to succeed.