Free Speech on Campus: A Forum
Four short essays about recent protests at universities—Yale, Missouri, Princeton, and beyond—and the debates they’ve provoked.
With contributions by David A. Bell, Marcia Chatelain, Jim Sleeper, and Anne-Laure White.
Winter 2025
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Conservatives Have Only Themselves to Blame for Today’s Campus Wars
Conservatives have turned college students into isolated, heavily indebted consumers of career training.
The Case for Safe Spaces
Contemporary student activists recognize that their organizing must emulate their goals.
A Moral Abdication
Reckoning with the past is a struggle that should be constantly engaged in, and nowhere more than in universities, in regard to their own histories. Avoiding this struggle is not an acceptance of the past. It is, rather, a moral abdication.
The Free Speech Straw Man
Student activists—often victims of harassment, bias, and threatening language—occupy buildings not in the name of disarming free speech, but rather to remind colleges and universities that they are rightfully evaluating and critiquing the speech they hear and internalize.
Unnatural Disaster: After the Chennai Floods
Last December’s floods in Chennai illustrated the devastating consequences of a development model that puts profits before people. But they also hinted at what a democratic response to climate disaster might look like.
A World to Make: Eleven Theses for the Bernie Sanders Generation
Beyond the delegate race lies the Sanders campaign’s larger potential: that a rising generation will emerge from it to transform American political life in ways that until recently seemed impossible. Here’s where they might start.
After Lahore
It took a gruesome attack for Pakistani authorities to recognize extremist activity in the country’s most populous province. But an incoherent counter-terrorism policy only threatens to make the problem worse.
In Memoriam: Bogdan Denitch, 1929–2016
Sociologist, leading democratic socialist, and longtime Dissentnik Bogdan Denitch passed away last Monday at the age of eighty-six.
Brazil on the Brink
Politicians like Lula and Rousseff should neither be above the law nor prosecuted outside it. As Brazil weathers corruption scandals and a democratic crisis, history reminds us that ignoring due process carries grave dangers.
The Renminbi’s Rollercoaster
As China’s economic prospects darken, headlines worldwide accuse China’s leaders of threatening global capitalism. Once upon a time, that was precisely the point.
Free Enterprise vs. Socialism: A Brief History
Business conservatives have demonized every piece of progressive legislation as “creeping socialism” since the 1930s. Now that a democratic socialist has called their bluff, they’re at a loss.
Dirty Power’s Last Stand in California?
In Oxnard, the largest city along California’s Central Coast, an immigrant community is winning the fight against what could be the state’s last fossil fuel power plant.
Making College Free Could Add a Million New Black and Latino Graduates
Bernie Sanders’s plan for higher education would go a long way toward improving graduation rates, raising incomes, and lowering unemployment among millennials—African Americans and Latinos most of all.
Pulp Nonfiction
“Zippy” creator Bill Griffith’s new book Invisible Ink is a curious masterpiece, merging the real-life personal saga of his mother with the story of the forgotten pulps.
