By Greg Lukianoff
Wednesday, January 01, 2025
It’s very hard for me not to be pessimistic about the
state of free speech in higher education. As president of the Foundation for
Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), I
have first-hand knowledge of just how dire things have been and continue to be
on campus.
According to FIRE’s Campus
Deplatforming Database, where we log all incidents we can find of on-campus
attempts to disinvite speakers from campus, shout down speakers, disrupt
performances, take down art exhibits, and prevent the screening of films, 2023
was the worst year on record for deplatforming attempts.
Or, it was until
a few weeks ago.
In late November, 2024 officially took the top spot, with
157 deplatforming attempts versus last year’s 156.
As of December 20 that number had shot up to 164—and
recent shoutdowns of campus speakers, like the disruption
of a panel discussion at Pace University, have a lot to do with it. What’s
worse, 1 out of 5 cases in FIRE’s database, which goes back all the way to
1998, are from the last two years. Much of that can be attributed to the
reaction to the war in Gaza that began in late 2023, with rising incidents of
all kinds of censorial and anti-free speech behavior on campus including riots, shoutdowns, and
more.
That’s not all.
This year, FIRE
surveyed 6,269 faculty members at 55 major colleges and universities (the
largest faculty free speech survey ever conducted), and found that 1 out of 3
admitted to hiding their political views to avoid censorial reprisals.
Still, despite all of this turmoil and bad news there is
still room for hope and gratitude, and it’s the perfect time of year to focus
on reasons to be thankful and hopeful. I don’t just mean that recent problems
on campus have highlighted just how bad things have gotten. While the response
to October 7 in higher education, for example, did indeed afford us this
realization, there are positive signs to be found.
One very promising development this year is the growing
rejection of diversity,
equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements in our colleges and universities. As
FIRE
has argued many
times
before,
these statements—which are often mandatory aspects of faculty hiring and even
student admissions processes—are unavoidably political litmus tests.
In other words, they are a systematic method for keeping
“wrongthinkers” out of academia—what my The
Canceling of the American Mind co-author Rikki Schlott and I call “The Conformity
Gauntlet.” FIRE
even sued the California Community Colleges system on behalf of six
professors to stop regulations that would force them to adopt and espouse
highly contested DEI concepts.
DEI statements pose a threat not just to free speech and
academic freedom on campus, but also to the very principles of free inquiry,
truth seeking, and open debate that undergird our institutions of higher
learning. Thankfully, many schools have begun to get the message—including MIT,
Harvard,
UMass-Boston,
Ohio
State, Syracuse
University, and others.
Another bit of good news is that many schools, including
some of the ones I just mentioned, have begun to adopt policies of institutional
neutrality. This is also critically important for our colleges and
universities because, as the University
of Chicago’s Kalven Report famously stated, “The university is the home and
sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” Adopting a policy of
institutional neutrality ensures that our institutions of higher learning once
again become—and this time remain—centers for free expression and open
discourse, where ideas and attitudes can be challenged and examined, and where
no ideological orthodoxy is inferred or enforced from on high. We expect this
momentum to carry into 2025 and beyond.
But perhaps the most promising development this year has
been the shattering of academia’s illusion of invulnerability. For too long,
higher education has fancied itself untouchable and irreplaceable, but it’s
beginning to recognize that neither of these assumptions are true. For one
thing, experiments like the University of
Austin show that where there’s a will for a totally different structure and
approach to higher education, there is also a way. I suspect many more scrappy
startups like UATX will pop up in the coming years, and if our legacy
institutions don’t start shaping up, they may end up losing their dominance
faster than they think.
And thanks to the work of organizations like FIRE and
many others, as well as a general cultural shift toward exposing and
criticizing these problems in academia, the veil of silence and conformity that
allowed the problems in these institutions to fester has been significantly
torn. More and more we are hearing from news outlets like the New
York Times and others about the rampant dysfunction in higher
education, and we are seeing a groundswell of public demand for reform.
There are also great ideas out there for improving our
knowledge-creation institutions. FIRE’s annual College Free Speech
Rankings, which rate schools based on their free speech policies, were
designed to incentivize good behavior on free speech and academic freedom. But
they were also meant to inspire ideas for innovation and improvement. Jay
Bhattacharya, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the National
Institutes of Health, has
some great ideas that could be applied in this area. He recommends adopting
policies that would better allow younger scholars to compete for NIH grants (as
they once did) because they tend to be more open to new ways of thinking and
doing research, which is a great way to shake things up and move things
forward. Bhattacharya also recommends funding replication studies and making it
a rewarding area for young scientists. These two reforms alone could be
transformative and vastly improve—and improve trust in—our knowledge-generating
institutions.
As they say, the first step is acknowledging that there’s
a problem, and it’s really starting to look like we’ve hit our mark with both
feet.
Looking forward to 2025, there are a number of things
that can happen in Washington to ensure that these advancements aren’t just
flashes in the pan. First, Congress can pass the Respecting
the First Amendment on Campus Act, which would require institutions to
disclose their policies on free speech and free association, encourage schools
to adopt the
Chicago Statement’s emphasis on the importance of freedom of speech at
institutions of higher learning, and require public schools to better protect
the First Amendment rights of students and faculty.
Second, President-elect Trump can reinstate the 2020
Title IX regulations, which are far better for protecting due process and
free speech on campus than the Biden
administration’s revision earlier this year, which eliminated the right to
a live hearing to adjudicate sexual abuse allegations, the right to
cross-examine one’s accuser and witnesses in real time, and the right to be
represented by lawyers in campus sexual misconduct proceedings. Similar to
guidance implemented by the Obama administration in 2011 that led to hundreds
of lawsuits against universities by those who were falsely accused, the
revisions even allow for the return of the “single investigator” model, in
which one administrator can serve as prosecutor, judge, and jury. The first
Trump administration protected the most basic elements of due process, only to
have Biden largely revert to the Obama-era policy. To create a more lasting
policy that can’t be undone each time the party in power changes, Congress can
also adopt a federal version of FIRE’s
state-level model campus due process bill, which would go a long way
towards securing students’ rights. Legislatures in Utah, North Dakota, North
Carolina, and Louisiana have already adopted these due process protections for
students at state public universities.
Third, Congress can pass legislation that codifies the
Davis standard for hostile environment harassment, laid down by the
Supreme Court in a 1999 ruling. The standard, often deliberately watered down
by federal regulators so that it allows punishment of protected speech,
emphasizes that addressing on-campus harassment requires that the behavior in
question be “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” that the targeted
student is prevented from learning or participating in campus life. This would
ensure that colleges can no longer claim legal cover for violating students’
free speech rights in the name of addressing discriminatory harassment on
campus.
And while it’s at it, Congress can also do a better job
protecting Jewish students from antisemitic harassment on campus without
threatening free speech rights. FIRE has laid out three ways they can do this:
codifying Davis, prohibiting on-campus harassment on the basis of
religion (with appropriate exceptions to protect religious liberty), and
confirming that federal law already protects against harassment based on ethnic
stereotyping.
That’s just a few of the ways we can make our campuses
safer for free speech in 2025 and beyond. It’s a tall order, and maybe more
than a little bit of wishful thinking. But it’s that time of year, isn’t it?
In many ways, 2024 was a dark year for free speech. It’s
not always easy to keep pushing forward, but one thing that keeps me going is
the little bits of progress our work allows us to secure—and the knowledge that
all the blood, sweat, tears, and effort really does have an impact. Defending
free speech can be a rough gig, but I wouldn’t trade the rewards for anything.
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