2024 was the worst year ever for campus free speech. Can we make 2025 better?
2024-12-31
Category: opinion

Well, it happened. This year is now officially the worst year on record for free speech on our nation’s campuses.&nbsp;&nbsp; Throughout 2024, I have been referring to research from my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which showed that&nbsp;2023 was the worst recorded year&nbsp;for attempts at our colleges and universities to disinvite speakers from campus, cancel performances, take down art exhibits and prevent the screening of films. This is based on FIRE’s&nbsp;Campus Deplatforming Database, which has been logging these kinds of incidents since 1998.&nbsp; As early as May, I&nbsp;knew&nbsp;that 2024 was going to be even worse. And on November 20, I was proven right. That day, my esteemed colleague and FIRE Chief Research Advisor&nbsp;Sean Stevens&nbsp;(who collected much of the data I’m providing you with here) announced that we had reached 157 deplatforming attempts, surpassing 2023’s&nbsp;156. &nbsp; REPORT HIGHLIGHTS PREVALENCE OF DEI AT IVY LEAGUE INSTITUTIONS: 'DOMINANT IDEOLOGY' A month later, that number is now&nbsp;164. I’m not surprised, either. This is in keeping with a rising trend of these attempts in the last half decade. In fact, one out of five cases in FIRE’s database right now represent deplatforming attempts that occurred in the last two years alone.&nbsp;  Of course,&nbsp;the usual suspects top the list&nbsp;in terms of schools with the most deplatforming attempts. In first place this year is Georgetown University with a whopping 43 attempts in 2024. Trailing it is Harvard with 28 attempts, and UC Berkeley with 26. Notre Dame isn’t far behind with 24. Boston College and Columbia University are tied next with 23 each.&nbsp; Sadly, anyone who believes this phenomenon was exclusive to a few elite university campuses is sorely mistaken. The free speech controversies run the gamut. At Pace University, students disrupted a panel discussion called "Saving Women’s Sports"&nbsp;by rushing the stage and yelling at panelists. &nbsp; Then there’s East Tennessee State University, where administrators&nbsp;added curtains and content warnings to an art exhibit&nbsp;and required visitors to sign a liability waiver before seeing it. Another lowlight occurred at Binghamton University where a&nbsp;radio interview with University of Pennsylvania professor Amy Wax was&nbsp;canceled 10 minutes before airtime&nbsp;because "the proposed interview did not meet [the] station’s goals of providing content by and for Binghamton students and community members."&nbsp; Such censorial behavior is pervasive at every level of higher education, so it isn’t surprising that faculty want to keep their heads down and not rock the boat in their classrooms, their research and their out-of-classroom speech.&nbsp;  In 2024, FIRE published the results of&nbsp;the largest faculty free speech survey&nbsp;ever conducted. While the results probably won’t shock you given how bad free speech has been on campus the last decade, they should absolutely infuriate you. The study asked 6,269 faculty members at 55 major colleges and universities a variety of questions regarding their comfort expressing themselves on campus. The result? We found that self-censorship on U.S. campuses is currently four times worse than it was at the height of the McCarthy era.&nbsp; That’s no exaggeration. In a major survey by sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens conducted in 1954, the height of McCarthyism, 9% of social scientists (who the researchers suspected were most likely to self-censor) claimed to have suppressed their own expression out of fear of causing controversy. In FIRE’s 2024 survey, the number of faculty who said the same was 35%.&nbsp; It gets worse, too. Fourteen percent of faculty reported suffering discipline or threats of discipline for either their teaching, research, academic talks or other off-campus speech. Twenty-seven percent feel unable to speak freely for fear of how students, administrators, or other faculty would respond. Forty percent worry about damaging their reputations because someone misunderstands something they have said or done, and 23% worry about losing their jobs because of it.&nbsp; If you can believe it, it gets even worse than that. Our survey was anonymous, but even the cloak of anonymity didn’t assuage some faculty’s concerns about speaking up. Despite the fact that we didn’t collect identifying information, some respondents still explicitly requested that we keep certain details they shared private. Others asked us to direct all correspondence to a private personal email rather than their faculty addresses. Some refused to answer our survey at all, even though their names and affiliations would not be shared.  I know I’ve been doomsaying here, but I wouldn’t do the work I do if I didn’t think there was hope for the future. In fact, there have been some promising developments this year.&nbsp; Schools like&nbsp;MIT,&nbsp;Harvard,&nbsp;UMass Boston,&nbsp;Ohio State,&nbsp;Syracuse University, and others have begun to reject political litmus tests in the form of&nbsp;Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)&nbsp;statements. Many other schools, including some of the ones I just named, have also committed themselves to policies of&nbsp;institutional neutrality&nbsp;in keeping with the&nbsp;Chicago Statement’s emphasis on the importance of freedom of speech at institutions of higher learning. &nbsp; Scrappy young startups like the&nbsp;University of Austin&nbsp;have given our legacy institutions a much-needed wake-up call that they aren’t invincible. And the media as well as the public have gotten much more comfortable exposing and criticizing the many issues plaguing higher education, as evidenced by&nbsp;The New York Times’ reporting&nbsp;on how The University of Michigan is having second thoughts about its DEI program.&nbsp; So yes, 2024 was terrible for free speech on America’s college campuses&nbsp;— the worst in recent memory, in fact. But 2025 is still ahead of us, and 2024's record is one we should try very hard not to break. Contrary to how it might seem, I don’t&nbsp;enjoy&nbsp;reporting all these terrible facts. In all honesty, I’d love it if FIRE had to put itself out of business. It’s doubtful that 2025 will be the year it happens, but we can certainly push ourselves further in that direction.&nbsp;