The Department of Education quietly shut down a campus free speech complaint tipline established in the waning days of the Trump administration last year.
The [email protected] email tipline was set up about a month after the 2020 presidential election by Department of Education officials in the Trump administration as a place for college students and staff to file complaints regarding violations of freedom of speech on college campuses.
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But after President Joe Biden was sworn into office in January 2021, the tipline’s operational status went into limbo. On Tuesday, the College Fix, which had filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records relating to the tipline, reported that the department shut it down at the end of July 2021.
“The Department assesses complaints received through any communication channel — including those received by the [email protected] mailbox before it became inactive — and takes appropriate action consistent with its legal authority,” the Department of Education told the outlet.
Prior to shutting down the email, the department set up an auto-reply in April 2021 which informed complainants the tipline would soon be shut down and directed all complaints to be filed with the department’s Office for Civil Rights.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Reed Rubinstein, director of oversight at America First Legal and former acting general counsel for the Department of Education, said the department’s decision to shutter the tipline was “unfortunate but not surprising.”
“With respect to the priorities of the Biden administration, they take a very different view of free speech, free inquiry, and academic freedom than we did,” Rubinstein said. “This is truly regrettable and a very sad commentary on the individuals currently running the department.”
Rubinstein said the department initially set up the tipline because it had been inundated with complaints from the public accusing various public universities of violating freedom of speech rights. Complaints also were filed against private universities that “misrepresented” their commitments to freedom of expression.
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“Protecting free speech, free inquiry, freedom of thought, those are all basic things that one should find in a healthy higher education environment,” he said. “The fact that the federal government was what needed to step in to protect those things is to signal a real problem on campus number one, and number two, the fact that the current administration has retreated from those values suggests a very large problem with respect to the Biden administration and its priorities. This is just so sad and so regrettable.”
