Laura Heymann

When I wrote Section 230 I did so knowing it would be critical for protecting free speech online. 30 years later and it’s one of the last things standing in the way of Republican censorship of the internet. Here’s to many more years of defending this vital safeguard of free speech.

Stop Meeting Students Where They Are What I learned when I finally started assigning the hard reading again.

A thoughtful perspective: "We need to help students grow into the difficulty of reading. The best way to do that is not to 'meet them where they are,' a bromide that has become doctrine for higher education. We have to do as Whitman says instead: Stop somewhere ahead and wait for them to catch up."

Related:

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My sense is that it comes from at least two places: growing up with much more parental involvement in decision making than in previous generations, and increased anxiety about failing. In both cases, having someone else (including ChatGPT) tell you what "the answer" is can be comforting.

America, JD Vance tells us, is merely a nation like many others ⁠– a “homeland”, he said upon accepting his nomination to the vice-presidency, for “people with a shared history and a common future”. That’s a vision of American identity that would have described bands of cavepeople in skins just as well or better. Stephen Miller’s proleptic defense of seizing Greenland last week suggests the Trumpists themselves know this. “We live in a world, in the real world ... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he declared. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Miller’s laws are the laws of animals. It is true, obviously, that high ideals have long been deployed to obscure or justify predation, here and elsewhere. But Miller’s stance and the stance of the administration is that there aren’t, actually, any high ideals worth pursuing or even pretending to – that the human being, in itself, is nothing so much ⁠and that we are, fundamentally and forever, primitives. Against the demands and best aspirations of civilization – western or any kind – they tell us the human being is a creature that yearns for nothing more than blood and soil, which is, of course, just mud. The lust for mud has taken up many guises in our history and has been many given names of late – neo-reaction, post-liberalism, fascism. But the name familiar to most is evil.

It was evil – the standpoint that only might matters, that human morality, and our sense of reality itself, must yield to the turfism of the primates with the biggest clubs – that ginned up the propaganda that provoked an act of terrorism against our legislature and the policemen defending it five years ago. It is evil that undergirds pronouncements from the same voices responsible for that attack, in defense of the man who shot Renee Nicole Good, that those who disobey the commands of law enforcement, however unsound or unjust, deserve summary execution – that implies, as Fox’s Jesse Watters and others have, that Good’s killing was of trivial significance because she was a lesbian “with pronouns in her bio”. It is evil that sends innocent men to foreign gulags, evil that condemns hundreds of thousands of destitute people abroad to death without a moment’s discussion or debate about what the country they had depended on might owe them, or the furnishing of alternative arrangements for their wellbeing. The gutting of USAID remains this administration’s worst and least surprising offense against the human conscience – a president who rejects the idea that we might have obligations to all within our society can’t be expected to wonder or worry about whether we have obligations to those outside of it. This is also why, after all the noise and nonsense about the need to depose the Maduro regime, the Venezuelan people are now being told that regime will be left in mostly in place for as long as it takes to secure and extract the country’s resources on our terms – that Venezuela will not see democracy unless and until it is profitable for the United States.

Democracy has always been a useless abstraction to those who deny we have basic human entitlements – for those who believe, instead, that the idea of human liberty is a luxury for those wealthy and powerful enough to consider themselves our betters rather than the birthright of all. As many who’ve taken to the streets in protest have noted, the Trump administration’s assaults on liberty here at home are the kinds of abuses that spurred the revolution we will commemorate this year. But no grand revolution is in the offing this time around. The only just and plausible recourse for our situation is politics – understood not merely as the contest to win any given set of elections but as the broader fight to forge a republic that honors and strengthens our humanity. The American project must and will succeed. Its enemies stand for too little. Our lives are worth too much.

I wrote about Renee Good, Venezuela, Greenland, and what it means to be a human being. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Saw this last week and very much agree with your review. While the production design was strong, and I'm glad I saw it, the production felt both too much and not enough. Too much making the subtext text; not enough of what it could truly mean to recognize the themes Wilde could not overtly discuss.

It’s the “season of love and giving”…but this year, doesn’t it seem more like a “season of fear and taking”? Like many of you, I’ve been saddened by the human impact of draconian government budget cuts and how angry many housed Americans are at unhoused Americans.

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Highlighting this article in light of today's Supreme Court argument in Cox v. Sony:

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Jim Ryan's letter is not just surreal and troubling; it provides a series of deeply sobering lessons—about the perils facing public universities today; about what it means to "work with" this Department of Justice; & about what leadership does (and doesn't) entail at this especially fraught moment.

No notes.

Tomorrow. Let’s win this, Virginia.

abigailspanberger.com/vote

Why This Essay Could Cause the University of Virginia to Shut Down How Linda McMahon’s latest “compact” would do deep and permanent harm to American higher education

Really excellent piece by @sivav.bsky.social. Anyone who cares about higher education (or free expression or democracy) should read this essay.

Opinion | Trump’s ‘Compact’ With Universities Is Just Extortion

Essential reading. Universities must stand together on this.

This is great. Maybe it's already implicitly included in the chart, but I would also highlight the practice of asking questions that assume the legitimacy of their premise -- "Do you plan to investigate/What is your response to [bonkers claim by opponent/random person on the Internet]?"

bsky.app/profile/lahe...

Seems like a governmental pyramid scheme -- the early joiners are promised untold riches and expected to recruit others, and everyone but the one at the top loses in the end.

Also, her statement seems to ignore that Section 230 doesn't just apply to "these companies" -- it applies to any "provider or user of an interactive computer service."

A letter to Alan Garber & John Manning

bsky.app/profile/lahe...

All this built-in generative AI is starting to feel like a technological snowplow parent -- popping up at the first opportunity to offer to clear the path and ease the difficulties that actually foster cognitive development, leaving a thin sheet of ice in its wake.

Columbia Agrees to $200 Million Fine to Settle Fight With Trump

You can never bend the knee enough to appease an authoritarian bully.

This is a devastating blow to academic freedom & freedom of speech at Columbia.

Never in the history of this nation has there been an administration so intent on the utter destruction of higher education as we know it.

Talk about The Wire, Sopranos, Game of Thrones all you want, but the greatest US television program ever made is Sesame Street. It's not even close. 50+ years of treating kids across class, ethnicity, religion not as mini-consumers...but as citizens with a stake in this world.

"Alligator Alcatraz" is wrong and media should not use it. It's propaganda. Alcatraz held people convicted of crimes, particularly violent crimes.

The Florida camp holds people *not* convicted of any crime. If they had been, they'd be in prison elsewhere.

The site is a textbook concentration camp.

Jim Gibson's article on this is well worth reading: scholarship.richmond.edu/law-faculty-...

💯 Modeling this is one way: "That's a great question. I'm not sure of the answer myself. Let's talk through how we might get there, and then I'll think about it some more and get back to you."

Last month there were allegations that some of my students may have used generative AI on my final exam. The incident led me to give some serious thought to how we are dealing with these tools in the professional education context. Here’s what I wrote to my students: jeremysheff.com/2025/06/02/g...

This is going to be a super interesting one to follow.

Definitely no. Apart from the homogeneity this is likely to encourage, it will almost certainly have disparate impacts. Yet another part of the application that applicants with resources will learn how to strategize around.