Tag: free

  • FIRE POLL: Americans overwhelmingly want free speech protected in AI regulation

    FIRE POLL: Americans overwhelmingly want free speech protected in AI regulation

    PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 10, 2026 — A new poll from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression finds that while Americans are apprehensive about the rise of artificial intelligence, they overwhelmingly believe that legislators should protect freedom of speech when crafting AI legislation and are concerned about laws being used to stifle criticism of government officials.

    The latest edition of the National Speech Index finds that most Americans are worried about the everyday use of AI, with 72% of Americans at least “somewhat” concerned, including 41% who are “very” or “extremely concerned.” But an identical percentage — 72% — is also at least somewhat concerned about the government regulating human-made expression that uses AI, with 35% “very” or “extremely” concerned.

    In total, a whopping 92% of Americans say it is at least somewhat important for governments to protect free speech when regulating AI, including 60% who say it is “very” or “extremely” important. Only 8% say it is “not very” or “not at all” important.

    “Our polling shows that Americans reject the false choice between regulating AI and protecting free speech,” said FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens. “Legislators should follow their lead and regulate technology thoughtfully, without regulating away the rights of the people who use it.”

    The National Speech Index is a recurring national survey that tracks Americans’ views on free expression, censorship, and First Amendment rights. For the January 2026 edition of the NSI, FIRE asked for the first time several questions about artificial intelligence and how Americans are grappling with the First Amendment implications of regulating this emerging technology.

    Americans are most concerned about AI regulation when it could be used to criminalize criticism of government officials; 72% are concerned, and 41% “very” or “extremely” concerned that laws restricting AI-generated content could be used to suppress criticism of elected officials. By contrast, Americans are much less concerned about AI legislation’s possible effects on social media use, and nearly half (48%) are “not very” or “not at all” concerned about its effect on comedians’ ability to create parody.

    Many Americans express concern about AI regulation (Stacked Bars)

    Americans have good reason to be worried about AI regulation targeting criticism of elected officials. FIRE is currently tracking bills introduced in Texas, Alaska, Arkansas, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New York, South Carolina, Vermont, and Virginia that would criminalize AI depictions of politicians in some form or another.

    “AI is an expressive tool, and the people who use it retain their First Amendment rights to share and seek information,” said FIRE legislative counsel John Coleman. “Like any technology, AI has its good and bad uses. But lawmakers must address genuine harms without writing laws that prevent Americans from criticizing those in power.”

    The January 2026 NSI also found that pessimism for the future of free speech has not budged from its historic high in the previous edition of the NSI in October 2025. 73% of respondents now say they believe the state of free speech is headed in the wrong direction, roughly in line with the 74% of Americans who said the same in October.

    The National Speech Index is a quarterly poll designed by FIRE and conducted by the Dartmouth Polarization Research Lab to capture Americans’ views on freedom of speech and the First Amendment, and to track how Americans’ views change over time. The January 2026 National Speech Index sampled 1,000 Americans and was conducted from Jan. 20 through 27. The survey’s margin of error is +/- 3%.

    The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought — the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE educates Americans about the importance of these inalienable rights, promotes a culture of respect for these rights, and provides the means to preserve them.

    The Polarization Research Lab (PRL) is a nonpartisan collaboration between faculty at Dartmouth College, Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania. Its mission is to monitor and understand the causes and consequences of partisan animosity, support for democratic norm violations, and support for partisan violence in the American Public. With open and transparent data, it provides an objective assessment of the health of American democracy.

    CONTACT:

    Alex Griswold, Communications Campaign Manager, FIRE: 215-717-3473; [email protected]

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  • Free speech in Trump 2.0

    Free speech in Trump 2.0

    One year into Trump 2.0, we examine the
    administration’s record on free speech and how it compares to the
    president’s campaign pledge to “bring back free speech to
    America.”

    We also discuss recent ICE protests, including the
    right to carry a gun and to film law enforcement, and what these
    encounters reveal about protest rights today.

    Today we are joined by:

    • Clark Neily, senior vice president
      for legal studies at the Cato Institute

    • Timothy Zick, professor of
      government and citizenship at William & Mary Law School and author
      of the new book
      Trump 2.0: Executive Power and the First Amendment

    • Conor Fitzpatrick, supervising
      senior attorney at FIRE

    Zick is also the author of
    Public Protest and Governmental Immunities    ,
    Managed Dissent: The Law of Public Protest    , and

    Arming Public Protests    .

    Timestamps:

    00:00 Intro

    01:47 ICE protests:
    Alex Pretti    , filming police, and the right to carry a
    gun

    13:30 How to hold law enforcement accountable

    19:10
    Don Lemon    ‘s arrest

    23:27 Trump’s retribution politics and the “domestic
    terrorist” label

    35:05 FCC pressure and attacks on the media

    39:40 Free speech for noncitizens

    53:49 Attacks on higher education

    58:40 Trump 1.0 vs. Trump 2.0

    01:02:25 What reforms are needed?

    1:09:13 Outro

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    and more.

    If you became a FIRE Member
    through a donation to FIRE at thefire.org and would like access to
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    paid subscriber podcast feed, please email [email protected].

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  • She offers free child care after disasters. It’s a lifeline as families rebuild their lives.

    She offers free child care after disasters. It’s a lifeline as families rebuild their lives.

    This story was produced by The 19th and reprinted with permission.

    When Hurricane Helene swept through Kelsey Crabtree’s small hometown of Black Mountain, North Carolina, two years ago, its fierce winds uprooted a large tree that landed on the roof of her house, jolting her and her husband awake. She went into the living room and noticed a huge crack where water had started to pour in. The couple grabbed their two sons, dragged a spare mattress to their laundry room and sheltered there overnight. 

    Eventually, Crabtree and her family made their way to her mother-in-law’s home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. They later moved into an Airbnb, where they stayed for nearly a year. The months after the storm were a blur, she said — lots of phone calls with insurance and hands-on work to fix their home, and all of that while scrambling to care for the boys, who were two and five at the time. 

    “We needed time to be childfree so we could work. We needed to be bringing money in so we could have our house back in order,” said Crabtree, who works as a therapist. “The limited child care was really making it challenging. It was limiting my ability to see clients.”

    So she got in contact with Silke Knebel.

     A single mom, Knebel founded the National Emergency Child Care Network a few months earlier to help other mothers who might need child care in an emergency. What constitutes an emergency is broadly defined in Knebel’s mind: It could be a disaster like Helene, It could be snowstorms, like the one that brought massive damage to a big slice of the northeast, or just the need for a few hours to recharge after a particularly stressful day.

    Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues. 

    In the last decade, weather and climate-related disasters have caused damages worth over $200 billion and affected the availability of child care in the long and short term. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 damaged over 650 child care centers, permanently closing 52 facilities. The Maui wildfire in 2023 destroyed four of the nine child care programs that were available in the city of Lahaina. Last year, the Los Angeles wildfires affected over 500 child care providers, with Altadena losing 60 percent of its child care centers in the tragedy. 

    Knebel’s desire to help others when a disaster strikes comes from her own experience as a single mom. In kindergarten, her eldest son was diagnosed with a mental health condition known as “conduct disorder,” which manifests as aggressive and behavioral issues. It soaked up a lot of Knebel’s emotional and physical energy. “I feel for other moms, because I had weekends where I cried all day and I needed that five or six hours of [care] from just somebody showing up at my door,” she said.  

    Her nonprofit is designed to do exactly that — deploy to families in a crisis. The organization is staffed by volunteers who have undergone extensive background checks and are trained in trauma-informed care: “We don’t bring on 16-year-old Care.com babysitters,” Knebel said. The volunteers are typically deployed in pairs to families in need, at no cost.  Many of them are retired teachers, pediatricians, social workers, and mothers and grandmothers who simply want to help.

    For Crabtree, they were a godsend. “The kids loved the people who came out and played with them,” she said. They would show up and have different games and toys and animal crackers and the kids were just so excited.” 

    Related: When a hurricane washes away a region’s child care system

    In the weeks and months after Hurricane Helene, Knebel connected over 50 families like Crabtree’s with child care volunteers. One mother had a sick and disabled husband at home  and when the storm hit, she was left to figure out how to do basic things like find water while taking care of her children and partner. Another, a mother of four, was worried that if she didn’t return to work soon, she wouldn’t be able to pay rent, but her child care center had been closed due to the storm. Then there was the family whose nanny’s house was destroyed in the hurricane. Sometimes, the mothers who called — the callers were almost always moms — were just exhausted or in desperate need of a few hours away from their kids to sort through the piles of paperwork, to call insurance adjustors, to figure out how to rebuild. 

    The first person to call Knebel’s child care emergency hotline was, however, the manager of a local bank. One of his employees was struggling to find child care weeks after the storm. Employers “try to be accommodating and compassionate,” she said. “But after a while, they’re like, ‘Okay, you need to come to work.’ And that’s when the real burden and stress hits families, because the child care is still not open.” 

    And it wasn’t the only employer she helped out. United Way of Asheville, an organization that provides disaster relief, requested volunteers to staff a pop-up child care for their employees. Also, an area school requested help for 40 teachers who all needed care for their own kids.

    At the same time that parents were struggling to find care, some 148 child care centers and home-based providers had been damaged by Helene — and no one knew how or when they would reopen.

    The barriers to getting child care back up and running after a disaster are immense, says Susan Butler-Staub, a senior vice president at Child Care Aware of America, an advocacy organization. “One of the biggest issues is finding a suitable environment,” she said. “If you’re a home-based provider and your home has been flooded or your home is gone, then can you find a temporary place that meets regulation?”

    If a provider is able to stay in their location, there’s usually a long list of issues they have to deal with first. “With a flood, you’re going to be dealing with mold in the walls,” she said. In western North Carolina, where Helene hit, “they are still dealing with water quality issues, so you have to filter the water before you can give it to children.”

    But even when facilities recover, paying for child care can become too much for families. Crabtree, who utilized child care volunteers mostly to assist while she rebuilt her house, said she could only afford to pay for child care when her extended family helped cover the cost. 

    Related: Child care crisis deepens as funding slashed for poor families

    A few months after Hurricane Helene, Knebel was faced with another call to action: Catastrophic wildfires were sweeping through Los Angeles and families would need help in the aftermath.

    Knebel’s organization promptly recruited and trained around 70 volunteers and connected with mothers like Briana Pozner, who had a 2-year-old and went into early labor with twins after the fires. While Pozner’s house wasn’t destroyed by the fire, it was contaminated with lead and other heavy metals, forcing the family to move out for a few months. 

    Kids’ lunch boxes sit in a locker at an elementary school that was destroyed by the Palisades Fire on January 14, 2025 in Pacific Palisades, California.
    Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

    Pozner and her family had already been preparing for how life would change with twins before the fires struck. She had recently enrolled her son in preschool — but then the preschool burned down. “It was like, OK, we’ve got to figure out how to get stability and figure out our son’s school.” 

    In Los Angeles, the impact of the wildfires on child care was devastating. Cindy Esquivel, program manager at the Low Income Investment Fund, a nonprofit that provided small grants to child care providers recovering from the wildfires, said that many home-based providers were still struggling to reopen. In some cases, they lost their homes and their businesses in one fell swoop.

    Finding the money for them to rebuild has been difficult. Of the 136 grantees that Esquivel surveyed after the disaster, 40 percent did not have insurance. Many home-based providers also rent their homes and in the aftermath, rents skyrocketed in the region, making it difficult to find a suitable and affordable location. 

    Related: 1 in 5 child care workers is an immigrant. Trump’s deportations and raids have many terrified

    Private child care providers do not qualify for FEMA funding. They can apply to the Small Business Administration for low-interest loans, but the process for approval is long and bureaucratic. Instead, a lot of funding comes from foundations and grant-making organizations. States have also chipped in, but the amount available varies by state and is usually a drop in the bucket compared to need, say experts. It’s an industry that, in the best of times, is already underfunded and operating at capacity. 

    A friend who had been volunteering with Knebel’s organization suggested that Pozner reach out and ask for assistance. Once the family was able to return home, “We had to get the whole house back in order with these little babies that I was breastfeeding,” she said. The volunteers watched her newborns while Pozner and her husband unpacked and organized. 

    Her son’s preschool eventually reopened, but it is now in its third location. Similar to North Carolina, it has been challenging for child care facilities and schools to find new homes.

    Knebel is only set up to offer help in California and North Carolina because that’s where she has volunteers. She plans to expand to other disaster prone states like Florida and Texas but needs to raise more funding to make that a reality. In the meantime, however, she gets calls from all over the country, for women experiencing all sorts of challenges. A few weeks ago, she heard from a woman in a domestic violence shelter who needed someone to watch her two children for a few hours. She has also fielded several calls from women at hospitals who need someone to watch their kids while they undergo surgery. Once, a grandmother whose daughter had just been incarcerated called, in need of someone to help watch her grandkids. 

    Knebel wishes she could help everyone. “It isn’t really just disasters. It’s school shootings, divorces, it’s a medical crisis, just experiencing a car accident,” she said. 

    Lately, she’s wondered how she can tap into the network of volunteers her organization trained in Los Angeles to help families who are afraid to send their kids to school because of ICE raids. In the last few days, she’s been emailing volunteers about the potential need for deployments if child care and schools closed in North Carolina, one of the states hit hard by the weekend’s winter storm. 

    “We just want to be there when children and parents need us,” she said. “Especially now, when things are getting so doom and gloom.”

    Since you made it to the bottom of this article, we have a small favor to ask. 

    If you believe stories like the one you just finished matter, please consider pitching in what you can. This effort helps ensure our reporting and resources stay free and accessible to everyone—teachers, parents, policymakers—invested in the future of education.

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    Liz Willen
    Editor in chief

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  • The campaign to crush free speech in Minnesota

    The campaign to crush free speech in Minnesota

    This essay was originally published in The Free Press on Jan. 21, 2026. Three days later, ICE agents shot and killed intensive care nurse Alex Pretti. See Aaron Terr’s analysis, “The Alex Pretti shooting and the growing strain on the First Amendment.”

    Over the past two weeks, Minneapolis has given the country a crash course in the First Amendment.

    The actions of protesters and politicians, during and in response to protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have become real-world lessons in the law of speech. The clashes have demonstrated which types of speech aren’t protected, along with passionate, angry, and unsettling speech that is protected. We’ve also gotten a chilling reminder of what goes wrong when the government pretends not to know the difference.

    For starters, the Justice Department has issued grand jury subpoenas to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and at least three other Democratic officials in the state, as part of an investigation into whether state and local officials obstructed federal immigration enforcement. Grand jury matters are secret, so we may never see the subpoenas themselves. But the public justification keeps circling back to speech. Federal officials have portrayed Walz’s and Frey’s criticisms of ICE as incitement, which is not protected by the First Amendment.

    But by any reasonable assessment, the statements that have been publicly attributed to Walz do not meet the legal standard for incitement. The governor urged people to speak out “loudly, urgently, but also peacefully,” and warned them not to “fan the flames of chaos.” That doesn’t cross the constitutional line. Walz also used metaphorical political rhetoric, saying no governor should have to “fight a war against the federal government every single day” — language that has lived comfortably inside First Amendment protection for generations.

    The speech that federal officials have criticized in Minnesota seems like protected political dissent, not obstruction or conspiracy.

    Frey’s most quoted line — telling ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis” — may strike some as crude and unstatesmanlike. But the f-bomb is not an actual bomb, and heated rhetoric like that is absolutely protected speech. Frey has also been accused of telling police to “fight ICE,” but at the same time he warned against a scenario in which federal and state authorities are “literally fighting one another,” and he urged de-escalation.

    The First Amendment exists to deny the government the knee-jerk ability to decide which dissent is too dangerous, irritating, or inconvenient to tolerate during tense moments. We must not forget that, even when the content of others’ speech unnerves or infuriates us.

    This is where the landmark 1969 Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio comes in. By the standard set in that case, advocacy is protected unless it’s “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

    That standard exists for a reason. Governments are always tempted to blame words for violence they can’t control. If “heated rhetoric” were enough, dissent would disappear whenever officials felt threatened — which, of course, would end up being all the time.

    The speech that federal officials have criticized in Minnesota seems like protected political dissent, not obstruction or conspiracy. That raises the discouraging possibility that the point of the Justice investigation isn’t to bring charges that will stick. Rather, it may be to use the threat of prosecution to chill speech.

    That’s not law enforcement. It’s ideology enforcement, backed by mob-like bully tactics.

    In defense of fiery words

    In the wake of political violence, calls to criminalize rhetoric are growing louder. But Brandenburg v. Ohio set the bar — and it’s a high one.


    Read More

    As for the protests themselves, some of what we’ve seen is textbook First Amendment activity: protesters chanting in public streets, filming law enforcement, warning neighbors of enforcement activity, criticizing policy. This is precisely the kind of free speech and free assembly the First Amendment was designed to protect.

    Nevertheless, there is plenty of unprotected speech being improperly justified on First Amendment grounds. Since the start of ICE operations in Minnesota in November, we have seen objects thrown at officers, crowds pepper sprayed and tear-gassed, and worse. But the extent to which the First Amendment is implicated in interactions between protesters and ICE agents often depends on how the granular details played out, which isn’t always clear from the videos and testimonies.

    U.S. district judge Katherine Menendez ruled last week that ICE agents can’t detain or use tear gas on peaceful observers who haven’t obstructed their operations. The 83-page ruling includes countless allegations from activists and ICE officers about each other’s conduct, many of which are egregious and some of which are factually incompatible with others.

    Some types of speech, like crowds telling ICE agents to kill themselves in the heat of a protest, might strike most people as upsetting and offensive, but are still protected. While the White House has claimed that such incidents are the result of a campaign of targeted harassment against federal officers, it has so far not provided evidence to that effect. It seems just as probable that those protesters were motivated by their personal dislike of federal law enforcement and chose a harsh way to express it.

    Some law enforcement activity violates the First Amendment even though it’s nonphysical. For example, there are credible reports that ICE agents have led civilian observers back to the observers’ homes. The message couldn’t be any clearer: ICE knows where you live. Assuming there’s no law enforcement reason to go to those homes, it’s a pure intimidation tactic designed to create a chilling effect, and the First Amendment is meant to protect us from that kind of retaliation for speaking out.

    Minnesota isn’t showing that the First Amendment is obsolete. It’s showing that balancing its demands is difficult, and that getting it wrong is dangerous.

    And then there’s the moment where the First Amendment lesson goes completely off the rails.

    Across the river in St. Paul, protesters entered a church and disrupted a worship service. Journalist Don Lemon filmed the event, and while interviewing a member of the congregation, was told: “Our church had gathered for worship, which we do every Sunday. We asked them to leave and they obviously have not left.” The next thing we hear is Lemon saying, “So, this is what the First Amendment is about.”

    No, it is not.

    The First Amendment does not grant a right to commandeer private spaces or force unwilling audiences in a private space into a political confrontation. A church is not a public forum, and the actions of that group that day are not legally protected expression. They have a right to gather outside the church and protest on the sidewalk, but by walking into a private service and refusing to leave, they are, at a minimum, trespassing.

    In this case, the protesters displayed a flawed understanding of protected speech. Believing your cause is morally urgent isn’t a valid defense for entering a private space unlawfully to deliver a message.

    Put all these events and incidents together and the overall lesson becomes clear. Minnesota isn’t showing that the First Amendment is obsolete. It’s showing that balancing its demands is difficult, and that getting it wrong is dangerous.

    Speech is not violence. Protest is not conspiracy. Criticism is not incitement. Violence is not speech. And disruption of private spaces is not protest. When we blur those lines, we don’t advance justice; we empower whoever currently has the authority to determine what those words mean. The First Amendment exists to deny the government the knee-jerk ability to decide which dissent is too dangerous, irritating, or inconvenient to tolerate during tense moments.

    We must not forget that, even when the content of others’ speech unnerves or infuriates us.

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  • Cops showing up at your door for political Facebook posts is absolutely intolerable in a free society

    Cops showing up at your door for political Facebook posts is absolutely intolerable in a free society

    This video is making the rounds — and it’s one every American should see.


    WATCH VIDEO: No one should have to fear that expressing a political opinion will lead to a knock on the door from the police.

    The video shows law enforcement showing up on the doorstep of Florida resident Raquel Pacheco. 

    What did she do? She criticized the mayor on Facebook. 

    Police coming to our doorsteps for lawful political speech — speech that doesn’t remotely rise to the level of incitement, harassment, or a true threat — is absolutely intolerable in a free society.

    The First Amendment means we have the right to criticize those in power. On Friday, we said as much to the Miami Beach Police Department.

    This isn’t the UK. Or China. Or Russia. This is America. No one should have to fear that expressing a political opinion will lead to a knock on the door from the police.

    See FIRE’s full letter to the Miami Beach Police Department.

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  • Supporting students and free speech on campus requires reform

    Supporting students and free speech on campus requires reform

    The recent polling on students’ views on free speech, published by HEPI, presents what looks like a confusing and muddled picture of students’ perspectives.

    On the one hand, today’s students appear more alert to the demands of safety and security than previous cohorts, with increased support for the use of content warnings, safe space policies, and a decent majority (63 per cent) who agree with the premise that protection from discrimination and ensuring the dignity of minorities can be more important than unlimited freedom of expression.

    On the other, the same cohort of students expresses support for a good number of principled free speech positions, with 70 per cent agreeing that universities should never limit free speech, and 52 per cent that education should “not be comfortable” because “universities are places of debate and challenging ideas.” There is also increased support for the proposition that “a lot of student societies are overly sensitive.”

    If you’re searching for coherence in students’ position then none of our collective mental models seems to apply – whether that’s a “woke” model (in the pejorative sense of snowflake students drawing equivalence of mild offence with grievous bodily harm), or from the classical liberal pro-free speech standpoint. These, we are forced to conclude, may not be the mental models current students are using in their understanding of navigating complex political territory.

    One of the characteristics of the free speech debate has been that a lot has been said about students, and the sort of environment they ought to be exposed to while on campus, but rather less attention has been paid to what students might want to say, or what purposes and values they attach to political debate and civic participation. The current political climate is, to put it mildly, grim as hell – raucous, accusatory, significantly short on empathy and compassion and, worst of all, not producing significant improvements in young people’s lives.

    Given that context, it might not be all that surprising that most students want at least one political party banned from campus – it was Reform topping the poll that caught the headlines last week, but I find more significant that only 18 per cent of students said that no political party should be banned from campus. Could it be that students don’t feel the parties have all that much to offer them?

    The winds are changing

    This is a deeply pertinent question for contemporary student leaders, who frequently find themselves in the cross-fire of these debates.

    Speaking to student leaders about free speech policy, particularly in the wake of the Office for Students’ intervention at the University of Sussex, there’s a growing challenge for institutions to confidently be a political actor on campus. And for students there is a real sense that their attitudes to politics at university are changing.

    On my regular briefing calls with student unions I run through the top ten things happening in policy that month, and recently there’s been a steady influx of questions about what happens when students get frustrated that there’s a new student society on campus that they ideologically disagree with.

    At one students’ union a group of Reform supporting students filed to be a registered SU society following the US election in 2024. Even if the Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act wasn’t around, the SU would still be required to register and ratify the society – the only difference now is it’s clearer they must follow the joint free speech code with the university. Students signed petitions and directed their anger at the SU for ratifying the society in the first place and any subsequent events held by ReformSoc were met with student protest (also protected under the terms of the new legislation).

    The protests centered around the events being a threat to safety on campus, fearing events would border on hate speech and that the SU no longer reflected or represented them. Students that protested likely support abstract principles of free speech, yet these don’t neatly map onto what they fear may be its results. The ratification and later protests did the rounds on social media and got the attention of the public at which point a rush of unpleasant comments and attacks headed towards the SU.

    In one sense all this is as it should be – the society was enabled to exist, those who wanted to protest did so – but it’s doubtful that much actual debate took place, or that many minds were changed. The SU leaders involved were left trying desperately to stick to the law, facilitate student political engagement, keep the peace, and protect themselves from increasingly vicious attacks for doing so.

    Statements and action about EDI, decolonisation or the recent trans ruling are wrapped up in a new sense of nervousness that will frustrate both ends of the student political spectrum, albeit in different ways. I did enjoy speaking to one team who told me the frustration from students about ReformSocs has led them to put on more EDI based events in the hope more students keep coming, find their safe spaces and recognise that the campus still represents them.

    Making it happen

    All this is contributing to a real tension when it comes to understanding how SUs can best support students and student leaders to become political actors, and agentive citizens. Both the toxicity of the current political environment and the regulations that are intended to try to lay down some principles to manage it, are difficult for student leaders to navigate.

    Now that the free speech legislation is in force, the next debate needs to be about how we get to a space where universities and SUs are agents of civic and political action which isn’t seen exclusively through the lens of “woke” or even the classical liberal position – but something more directly applicable to students’ lived experience of engaging with these tricky political issues.

    There needs to be a deeper understanding and discussion within the student movement, supported by institutions, of the importance of having a plurality of ideas on campus and recognition of the particularities of the current political moment. For university to be both a safe space and also a space to be challenged, the mode of challenge needs to be tailored to the issues and the context.

    In the conversations I’ve had there’s a willingness to try and convert the protest energy into political action, to push SUs to continue to be political agents and welcoming of debate, developing students’ civic identities. I’d love to see debates about free speech reframed as an exciting opportunity, something which already allows diverse student thought, often through student societies. But just sticking to the rules and principles won’t deliver this – we need to move the conversation to the practicalities of making this happen.

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  • Podcast: Free speech, Scottish budget, Mickey Mouse

    Podcast: Free speech, Scottish budget, Mickey Mouse

    This week on the podcast new polling suggests over a third of students think Reform UK should be banned from speaking on campus – a higher proportion than previous surveys found for the BNP or English Defence League. So what does this tell us about free speech in higher education?

    Plus Scotland’s budget settlement and legislative changes, and unpacking what “Mickey Mouse courses” really means.

    With Andy Long, Vice Chancellor at Northumbria University, Jess Lister, Director of Education at Public First, and Debbie McVitty, Editor at Wonkhe and presented by Mark Leach, Editor in Chief at Wonkhe.

    On the site

    41 per cent of Reform-voting undergraduates don’t think Reform should be allowed to speak on campus

    So you’ve been accused of harbouring “Mickey Mouse” courses at your institution… now what?

    Identifying “mickey mouse” courses

    Scottish Budget 2026 to 2027

    You can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Acast, Amazon Music, Deezer, RadioPublic, Podchaser, Castbox, Player FM, Stitcher, TuneIn, Luminary or via your favourite app with the RSS feed.

    Transcript (auto generated)

    It’s The Wonkhe Show. A third of students want Reform off campus. We’re talking about what’s really going on behind the data. It’s been a big week of fees and funding in Scotland and the Mickey Mouse row returns. But who’s really taking the mic? It’s all coming up.

    And it is obviously reasonable for people to question the value of university courses based on, for example, academic rigour, student outcomes, and broader societal value. But it’s not reasonable for them to arbitrarily decide on this based on no evidence. I’m afraid I see this article as really very lazy journalism.

    Welcome back to The Wonkhe Show, your weekly guide to this week’s higher education news, policy and analysis. I’m your host Mark Leach, and here to chew the fat over this week’s news, as usual, are three brilliant guests. In Newcastle, it’s Andy Long, Vice-Chancellor of Northumbria University. Andy, your highlight of the week, please.

    Thanks, Mark. Yesterday, we had a tour of our soon-to-be-opened North East Space Skills and Technology Centre. It’s going to be the home to some really exciting research and teaching on satellite and space science and technology, and we were accompanied by the North East Mayor, Kim McGuinness, who’s a great supporter of this initiative.

    Lovely. And with us is Jess, Director of Education at Public First. Jess, your highlight of the week, please.

    Hello, yes. Mine is a bit of a brag, I’m afraid. We launched our report this week on national numeracy. And usually when you launch a report, you’re looking for pick-up in The Times or The Telegraph, or one of the broadsheets. But I was delighted that for the first time, our report was discussed on This Morning, on the sofa. So there you go. A report launch first for me.

    Very good. And in North London is Demetri Onakés-Elizadebi. Your highlight of the week, please.

    Well, I had an excellent meeting of the Audit and Risk Committee of the organisation that I’m a trustee of, which is the National Institute of Teaching. It sounds terribly dull, but actually we had a very lively discussion about internal audit, and that was very much the highlight of my week. That’s pretty sad, but there it is.

    The Higher Education Policy Institute has conducted a third wave of polling of student views on free speech. The first of these waves was in 2016, around the time of Brexit. The second was in 2022, around the time of Covid. The latest was conducted in November and published this morning, and it’s trying to explore whether, as some commentators have suggested, the era of “woke” is over, in light of the election of Donald Trump and a supposed sea change in public views.

    What we see here is some really quite mixed results. There’s growth in the number of students who think universities are less tolerant of the expression of a free range of views. That’s up to 47 per cent, which is a little bit concerning. Fifty-two per cent think student societies are typically oversensitive. That tends towards the idea that students are coming away from what would be characterised as anti-free speech positions. But support for safe space policies and trigger warnings has grown over the same period, which points the other way.

    The eye-catching result that is all over the press this morning is that one third, about 35 per cent, think Reform UK should be banned from campus. Earlier waves polled on organisations like the EDL, BNP and UKIP, and around a quarter to a third of students in earlier waves expressed support for those organisations being banned from campus. Reform is obviously something a little bit different.

    DK has unpacked this on the site today, and one of the things he notes that is worth contextualising is that the number includes Reform-voting students, so there is something going on there. He also notes that only 18 per cent of students said that nobody should be banned from campus. There is clearly something going on here about students’ attitudes to political parties. There are loads of other questions in there about events, memorials and curriculum. One thing to take away is that a lot of students are in the “it depends” camp. There is more nuance here than it might look like at first blush.

    Yes, lots going on here. Just where to begin, because a lot of this looks quite contradictory on the face of it. For example, 41 per cent of Reform-voting students don’t think Reform should speak on campus. Is this about students in general and attitudes to politics, or is there a partisan thing going on here?

    One of the first things you learn when you start doing public opinion research is that people can comfortably hold competing views in their heads and not see the logical inconsistencies. This is a large sample of around a thousand students, done by a reputable polling company, and HEPI is a reputable outlet. It’s not possible to look at this and say the sample is wrong or the poll is wrong. What is interesting is thinking about what sits behind some of the questions.

    Take the headline that a third of students would ban Reform UK from campus. I’m interested in whether they want them banned, or whether they just do not want to listen to them. That has always been one of the tensions in free speech policy. You can have a right to lawful free speech on campus, but you do not have a right for anyone to turn up and listen to you, or to like you for your views. Sometimes all of this gets muddled up.

    It’s a really interesting finding. It’s going to wind up all the people who like to be wound up by these things. It should also cause everyone else to pause for reflection. This should not be dismissed. There is a conversation to have about what university leaders can do to break down polar opposites of views. “I do not mind free speech, I just do not want to hear from these people. I do not want to engage.” That is a substantive discussion.

    In terms of the polling, it would be interesting to follow this up. Polling shows what people think. It does not explain why. It would be useful to see more discussion about why students think parties should be banned from speaking, and what they mean by “banned” in this context.

    It makes me wonder whether students have a more nuanced view than this makes out. There is lots of support for safe spaces and content warnings. Does that suggest that this language of banning, and the binary debate that often dominates the free speech conversation, is not where they are in their heads?

    I think Jess captured it well. It may be about whether students want to ban things or whether they just do not want to hear them. Social media, and how people interact through it, colours expectations. In the past you might have expected to hear a range of views through different media. Now your social media channel can be largely focused on things you agree with, and you may be more reluctant to engage with those you do not.

    In the end, a proportion of the population will always want to ban things they do not like. Students may not be terribly different to the rest of the population. What we also know is that 18 to 24 year olds are far less likely to support Reform than, for example, the Green Party. A recent YouGov poll showed that 10 per cent of that age group supported Reform and 30 per cent supported the Greens. It’s interesting in this study that 7 per cent of people want to ban the Greens from speaking on campus. Put together, people often want to ban, or avoid hearing from, people they disagree with. If fewer young people support Reform, more of them want to see Reform banned, or just do not want to hear from them.

    It’s also interesting that in previous waves of this survey, parties asked about were more extreme than Reform. In 2016 and 2022, the survey asked about the BNP and the English Defence League, and similar older, defunct but still culturally present far right organisations. This year, if you put all the parties asked about on a left-to-right scale, Reform is the most extreme. It would be interesting to see whether the polling is showing that people do not want the most extreme parties to come to campus, or whether it is Reform specifically.

    What really matters is how universities respond to this. I see no evidence that they are banning speakers from different political parties. The only evidence I have is when we had hustings for the mayoral elections. Our students’ union organised those, all candidates were invited, and the Reform candidate decided not to come. They would have been welcome to come and put their case forward and answer questions from our students, but they did not want to.

    Student leaders are in a really interesting position here. I’m reminded of a conversation I had at the Festival of Education in November, around the time this polling was being conducted, with a student leader wrestling with her responsibilities around a Reform society on campus. Inevitably it was framed in free speech terms. The students who wanted to set up the society and invite speakers felt strongly about it, as did the students who felt it was inappropriate. As a student leader, she had to navigate that space. That nuance of how you listen to both camps, and what purpose political societies serve on campus in terms of civic engagement and political debate, is part of the picture.

    Mark asks about Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice, who has jumped on the polling and called the findings appalling. He claims British universities have abandoned being centres of genuine learning, rigorous debate and intellectual challenge, instead becoming echo chambers of far left indoctrination run by activist academics. This is his long-held position already. It plays neatly into how he wants to talk about universities, and it frames the culture war quite starkly. There is a danger the nuance gets lost in the mainstream.

    Students having left-wing views should surprise nobody. That has been true for a long time. Richard Tice believing universities are far left indoctrination camps is also a long-held view. None of this is new. He did not use the “left-wing madrasas” line this time. What is interesting is the second paragraph of his statement, which arguably gives the sector an answer. He says universities bear responsibility for allowing this culture to fester. Universities do now bear responsibility for helping and encouraging as healthy a debate as possible on this topic. If I was a university vice-chancellor, I would be thinking about how to get better debates on campus. We are a long way out from an election, but this issue is going to bubble and bubble unless universities are seen to do something.

    This debate only ever interests the political elite. It is not usually a mass public opinion issue, but it acts like a barnacle on the sector’s reputation. The more work you see on how to have debate on campus, including with people you disagree with, the less weight these “echo chamber” attacks have. This also draws heavily from the US playbook. Under Trump, Republicans had universities in their sights and started stripping out grant funding, often using free speech as a rationale. You can see Reform dipping a toe in the water about something like that here in the UK, without really understanding the funding system they would be trying to reshape. They are pulling from what has happened in the US and trying to make it a UK-wide debate.

    There is also something about “woke” as a category. The origins of the term are about being attuned to social inequality and understanding how different groups can be marginalised, particularly around racial and ethnic marginalisation. But it has expanded and taken on a pejorative life of its own, used from a hostile ideological position towards universities. It would be odd if students themselves, who are not immersed in anti-woke discourse, were to treat a basket of positions around free speech as a coherent “woke” label. That coherence is often assumed by the people asking the questions or analysing the results, rather than by students themselves.

    In Wonkhe polling, there is also a link between a sense of freedom to speak on a personal level and being part of a marginalised group. We can too readily assume freedom of speech means freedom to attack left-wing positions. It can be as much about feeling safe, feeling part of a community, and understanding the purposes of speaking up as it is about entitlement to be exposed to controversial views. Now that the sector has been through the free speech debate, the legislation, the regulator, and the policies, there is a case for going back to students and asking what matters to them in taking part in a conversation, what the purpose is pedagogically, and what it does for development as a graduate and citizen in a complex political environment.

    Let’s see who’s important for us this week.

    Hi, I’m Shine Jackson, an employment partner at Mills & Reeve specialising in the sector. After months of parliamentary back and forth, the Employment Rights Act 2025 finally made it into the statute books just before Christmas, with wide-ranging implications for the sector. From new rules on unfair dismissal and zero-hours contracts, to tougher requirements on sexual harassment and major changes to industrial action, these reforms will have a real impact on how universities manage their people and risk. In my blog I’ve set out five things sector leaders need to know to prepare for these reforms, with a handy table of implementation dates.

    Now, Jess, it’s been a busy month in Scotland. Tell us what’s going on.

    It has. In Scotland we’ve seen the launch of a Future Framework for universities, a joint government and sector initiative to scope out the long-term needs of Scotland’s higher education system all the way to 2045. It’s worth noting this is not a full review. It’s more the start of an evaluation of the sector’s long-term financial sustainability, what it might need, and what Scotland’s economy might need. It is not a promise that anything in the current system is going to change. It is also a reminder that the Scottish system is much more reliant than the English system on direct government funding because students currently do not pay fees. So what the government decides its long-term settlement is going to be is key.

    We’ve seen indications the Scottish government is willing to provide some further support. There’s been an above-inflation increase in teaching and research budgets announced this week, perhaps in the hope of avoiding another Dundee-style incident. The final thing that’s interesting is that, similar to England and Wales, the Scottish government is now trying to scope out not just what a higher education funding strategy looks like, but a tertiary one too.

    Debbie responds that Scotland is already more “tertiary” than England in the sense of a post-16, post-18 offer across the system. There may be politics going on. Before Christmas the minister announced a plan to work with the university sector on the funding framework. Scotland’s universities face a genuine financial crisis, which is also a problem for the country. The framework plan may be designed to get under the skin of the issues and carry the conversation across the Scottish Parliament elections in the spring. The tertiary approach is also connected to the Tertiary Education Bill, and may reflect pressure from Scotland’s colleges that a higher education funding settlement implicates them too.

    Committing to a strategy is a step above annual budgets, and it signals a desire to link system sustainability to national goals. But there is always a risk that strategies keep the conversation going without real action. Funding higher education long term is difficult. The approach may be useful, but delivery remains uncertain.

    Andy notes that Scottish universities receive up to £2,000 a year less per home student than English universities do, and are even more reliant on international student income. There is also a relatively small group of Scottish universities that can do very well in international recruitment, meaning there is less to go around for others. England faces its own pressures, including undergraduate fees being flat for 11 of the last 13 years and recent reductions in international student numbers, but the challenge is greater in Scotland.

    Jess suggests that a joint government and sector review, without promises, could be a model for England closer to 2030. The question is whether it becomes a good conversation without political and funding heft behind it. Andy cites a London Economics statistic from a few years ago that in England students and graduates cover around 84 per cent of the total cost of higher education, with government funding around 16 per cent, and contrasts this with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The rhetoric from politics recently has often suggested students should pay more, not less, which does not suggest a more generous settlement is imminent.

    There is also an acknowledgement that, despite everyone insisting the Scottish review is not just about fees, it inevitably is. The politics of “free education” remain a touchstone, particularly for the SNP, but there is a sense that without a clever political route to change, the funding crisis will continue. There are alternative models, such as salary-based graduate repayments, but implementing them is difficult. Scotland may choose to try something different.

    That’s about it for this week. Remember you can go in deep on anything we discussed today. You’ll find links in the show notes on wonkhe.com. Don’t forget to subscribe. Just search for The Wonkhe Show wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to get ahead of everything going on in UK higher education, hit subscriptions on the site to find out more. Thanks to Jess, Andy and Debbie, and to Michael Salmon for making it all happen behind the scenes. We’ll be back next week. Jim will be here. Until then, stay Wonkhe.

     

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  • The worst of both worlds for campus free speech

    The worst of both worlds for campus free speech

    This op-ed originally appeared in The Dispatch on Dec. 30, 2025.

    2025 was the worst year for campus censorship in decades, and that’s because it’s coming from every possible direction — especially the MAGAverse. 

    For most of my career, the biggest threat to free speech on campus came from inside higher education: the on-campus left (students, yes, but more importantly administrators) using the power of investigation and discipline to punish “wrongthink.” The right pushed, too, but those pushes overwhelmingly originated off campus. This makes sense, given that there simply aren’t that many conservatives in the student body, on the faculty, or — least of all — among administrators in higher education.

    In 2025, what changed was the balance of power and the source of the pressure. The federal government and state governments, using the levers of state power, are now the leading forces behind attempts to punish campus speech. In the data my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, tracks — our Students Under Fire database — incidents involving censorship attempts from politicians or government officials jumped to roughly a third of all cases this year. In 2024, those incidents didn’t crack double digits. 

    It’s just as bad for faculty. This year, a record 525 Scholar Under Fire incidents occurred, far eclipsing the previous high of 203 in 2021. One mass-censorship incident at the U.S. Naval Academy accounts for almost three-fifths of the entries. However, even if we treat this event as a single incident, 2025 was still a record year in our Scholars Under Fire database, with 216 entries. Worse, from 2000 through the end of 2024, we recorded 102 entries with politicians as one of the sources of a cancellation campaign. This year alone, we recorded 114.

    This produces the bleakest speech landscape imaginable: Government pressure is skyrocketing, while the internal campus coalition that helped create this vulnerability in the first place hasn’t disappeared — creating a worst-of-both-worlds squeeze on the expressive rights of students and faculty.

    For years, the core campus free-speech problem wasn’t merely bureaucratic. It was an unholy alliance. Administrators, who had been a problem for my entire career (especially those whose job titles quietly evolved into ideological enforcement roles like “DEI dean”) joined forces with a wave of highly activist, more speech-ambivalent students that began hitting campuses around 2014. That was roughly when the first Gen Z students started to arrive on campus. This generation was more anxious and depressed than those that came before it (at least since World War II and the GI bill expanded the availability of higher education), and colleges either fed or accommodated these problems with trigger warnings, safe spaces, a hunt for microaggressions, and the blurring of the line between speech and violence. 

    That is where campus free speech is now: not just arguments about campus codes, but fights about whether the government can use its most coercive tools to enforce ideological conformity.

    The alliance between righteous students and crusading administrators drove some warranted investigations, yes, but it also got people sanctioned, suspended, disinvited, and fired. It made dissent from orthodoxy professionally radioactive. It turned higher education into a place where the easiest way to survive was to self-censor or seek employment elsewhere.

    That problem persists, but 2025 added something more dangerous: politicians and government agencies increasingly driving, directing, and escalating punishment campaigns from outside the university.

    That distinction matters because the government’s tools are not a dean’s tools. Government can threaten funding, immigration status, research grants, and institutional survival itself.

    You can see it in the Trump administration’s campaign against elite universities, especially Harvard. This year, the Department of Homeland Security moved to revoke Harvard’s certification to enroll international students, and a federal court blocked that move while litigation proceeds. The White House then issued a proclamation suspending entry for foreign nationals seeking to study at Harvard, framed as a national-security measure.

    We can debate Harvard’s sins — there are plenty. But what should not be debatable is that targeting a specific institution with immigration authority as leverage is not normal governance in a liberal democracy. It’s political payback that may be fun for some people in the administration, but probably won’t even fix anything.

    Three takeaways from Harvard’s victory over the Trump administration’s funding freeze

    If the government is going to punish universities for violating the law, then it must do so lawfully.


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    Sadly, Harvard isn’t the only example. The administration has used frozen funds, threatened cancellations, and “make a deal or else” tactics against schools around the country — turning what should be a debate about institutional reform into a contest of political submission. Columbia, for example, saw hundreds of millions in federal funds cut and then faced enormous pressure to reach a settlement to restore support. Brown University and Northwestern University cut deals to restore research funding. 

    Once this becomes the model — political leverage first, negotiated compliance second — universities are no longer institutions that argue and persuade. They’re institutions that bargain to survive.

    The Trump administration even tried to formalize this approach through a so-called “higher education compact” — a document that asked universities to pledge support for a menu of administration priorities in exchange for federal benefits. It was stuffed with unconstitutional conditions, and it sent the message loud and clear: We will decide the price of doing business in American higher education.

    At the individual level, the chill becomes something else entirely — especially when immigration authority gets involved. Take Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts. In March, after the government revoked her student visa, masked plainclothes federal agents detained her on a Somerville, Massachusetts, street and put her into an unmarked vehicle, after which she was quickly moved to an ICE facility in Louisiana — over her lawyers’ objections and amid litigation over where her case should be heard. 

    The core speech at issue wasn’t a threat, a crime, or some exotic incitement. It was an op-ed she co-authored in a student newspaper arguing that Tufts should divest from Israel. You don’t have to agree with it — that’s not the point of free speech. The point is that in the United States, it should not be the case that a person here on a student visa can be detained and threatened with deportation for writing a political opinion that could have run in any mainstream newspaper in the country.

    And notably, when a federal judge later ordered her release, he described her detention as unlawful and tied it directly to First Amendment concerns. This is also why my organization sued Secretary of State Marco Rubio this year, challenging immigration law provisions we argue are being used to punish protected speech by legal immigrants.

    That is where campus free speech is now: not just arguments about campus codes, but fights about whether the government can use its most coercive tools to enforce ideological conformity.

    Now, some readers will object: “What about Obama and Biden?”

    Fair point. Prior administrations helped create the modern campus speech mess, and not only through cultural encouragement. They often worked more indirectly, through the Department of Education and its civil-rights enforcement machinery — guidance letters, compliance regimes, and expansive theories of harassment that were then eagerly operationalized by sympathetic campus administrators.

    We fought that too at FIRE, even when nobody cared.

    Years ago, for example, my organization criticized federal “blueprints” that encouraged universities to stretch harassment definitions in ways that risked swallowing protected speech. This wasn’t a partisan hobby. It was the same principle: The government should not be in the business of pressuring universities into punishing speech, whether it’s done through backchannel regulatory guidance or through overt political threat.

    But 2025’s shift is that the pressure is more direct, more punitive, and more personalized — less “guidance,” more “kneel before Zod!”

    And here’s the part I’m done being delicate about: For 25 years, we documented the free-speech crisis on campus while a lot of higher education either denied it, rationalized it, or treated it as a moral victory. We warned that turning universities into ideological enforcement machines would generate backlash. Not because we wanted backlash, but because anyone with eyes could see that a system that punishes dissent while claiming to pursue truth is not stable. It was going to trigger a reaction.

    The more higher education demonstrates it understands its own legitimacy crisis and is willing to reform, the less political oxygen there is for escalating reprisals from increasingly powerful state actors.

    Now I keep hearing a question — sometimes asked fairly, sometimes in a way that assumes the problem came from talking about it — along the lines of: “Don’t you feel guilty for contributing to the backlash?”

    No, because I did no such thing.

    Reporting on a crisis did not create it. Documenting censorship did not cause it. Warning about backlash did not summon it. The people who should feel guilty are the ones who are responsible: the administrators, faculty, and students who let the craziness on campus become normal and then acted shocked when the bill came due.

    And the bill is measurable. Public confidence in higher education has fallen dramatically over the last decade. Pew recently reported that 70 percent of Americans now say higher education is headed in the wrong direction, up from 56 percent just a few years ago. Gallup’s long-running confidence measure tells a similar story. Even after a recent uptick, only 42 percent of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education — still far below the 57 percent who said so when Gallup first asked in 2015.

    Those numbers should have been a wake-up call. Instead, much of the higher-ed establishment has treated the credibility crisis as a conspiracy theory: a “moral panic,” a hoax, a right-wing plot, an exaggeration. We’ve seen this posture from influential voices who insist the last decade’s free-speech crisis was mostly manufactured — just a media obsession built from anecdotes. Professor Jason Stanley, formerly of Yale and now at the University of Toronto, has used exactly that frame. The American Association of University Professors and other gatekeepers have often treated calls for viewpoint diversity and institutional neutrality as hostile demands rather than basic components of truth-seeking.

    And you can see it in leadership rhetoric, too: the tendency to describe political attacks in vivid detail while taking almost no responsibility for the internal failures that made universities such an easy political target. When prominent university leaders frame the story as, “We are innocent, and this is being done to us,” they’re not just refusing accountability. They’re handing the backlash more fuel.

    Meanwhile, some of the behavior that helped bring us here continues — right out of 2021.

    Consider what happened at the University of Virginia Law School. Professor Xiao Wang helped win a unanimous Supreme Court decision in a case involving a legal standard that put a heavier burden on straight people to prove employment discrimination. In a healthy university, the response would have been to read the briefs, argue about the doctrine, debate the consequences, and learn something.

    Instead, Wang faced a wave of backlash that treated the case not as a legal question but as a moral betrayal — complete with pressure campaigns and demands that looked like ideological loyalty tests. That’s not a glitch. It’s a reminder: The internal coalition that drove the last decade’s crisis has not disappeared. It’s simply been joined by a much more aggressive external force.

    That brings us to the hard truth nobody wants to say out loud: Higher education really does need reform, and some of that reform will have to involve the federal government and state governments — because the government helped build the incentive structure that produced this mess, and because public universities are state actors. There are plenty of constitutional reforms available. Colleges can enforce viewpoint-neutral rules, strengthen due process in discipline, demand transparency, stop outsourcing institutional governance to ideological offices, and require that speech protections be real rather than a branding exercise.

    Why FIRE is now judging bias-reporting systems more harshly — and why I changed my mind

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    But there is also a difference between constitutional reform and a rampage. Universities have been strangely lucky so far that many of the administration’s most extreme tactics are the kind that courts can — and often will — stop. For FIRE’s part, we’ll keep fighting them whenever they cross the line into infringing on expressive rights. But universities need to do their share, too: Admit they have a problem, and start fixing it seriously.

    The more higher education demonstrates it understands its own legitimacy crisis and is willing to reform, the less political oxygen there is for escalating reprisals from increasingly powerful state actors. The more it stays in denial — insisting this vast, wealthy industry has nothing to fix, that the last decade of cancel culture and ideological conformity was mostly a hoax, and that the critics are all acting in bad faith — the more likely the backlash becomes uglier, broader, and harder to stop.

    Things that will not bend will break. And if higher ed stays in denial, it may find that 2025 wasn’t the bottom, but rather an alarm call. And if 2026 is worse, it won’t be able to say it wasn’t warned.

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  • Bari Weiss, UATX, and the Corporate Rewriting of “Free Speech”

    Bari Weiss, UATX, and the Corporate Rewriting of “Free Speech”

    Bari Weiss has built a powerful public identity as a defender of free speech against institutional conformity. From elite universities to legacy newsrooms, she presents herself as a principled dissenter confronting ideological capture. Yet her expanding influence across higher education and corporate media suggests something deeper than individual controversy. It reveals how elite institutions are increasingly repackaging control, consolidation, and risk management as rebellion.

    Weiss’s involvement in the University of Austin and her editorial authority at CBS News illustrate how the language of free inquiry has been absorbed into a broader project of institutional realignment rather than democratization.

    The University of Austin was launched in 2021 as a highly publicized response to what its founders described as illiberal conditions in American higher education. Weiss, as a co-founder and public face of the project, helped frame UATX as a refuge for intellectual risk-taking and heterodox thought. Yet the institution was not built from the margins of academia. It emerged through the backing of wealthy donors, venture capitalists, tech executives, and high-profile media figures who already occupy powerful positions within American public life.

    UATX’s critique of higher education centers almost entirely on cultural politics, presenting universities as hostile to dissent while leaving largely untouched the material structures that govern academic freedom. The casualization of academic labor, the erosion of tenure, donor influence over research agendas, student debt as a disciplinary force, and retaliation against labor organizers and whistleblowers rarely figure into the narrative. In this way, UATX offers not a systemic challenge to elite education but an exit strategy for those with the resources to opt out of public accountability.

    The same logic appears in Weiss’s role within legacy media. In late 2025, CBS News pulled a completed investigative segment from 60 Minutes examining the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelan migrants to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador. The segment had reportedly passed legal and editorial review. The decision to shelve it, attributed to a demand for additional on-the-record administration comment, sparked internal outrage. Veteran journalists described the move as political interference rather than standard editorial caution, with some staff reportedly threatening to resign.

    The episode carried a deep irony. One of the most prominent self-described defenders of free speech now presided over the suppression of investigative journalism within one of the country’s most storied news programs. Whether temporary or permanent, the delay signaled a shift in institutional priorities, where political sensitivity and corporate risk appeared to outweigh journalistic autonomy.

    This controversy unfolded amid broader upheaval at CBS News. Longtime anchors departed the CBS Evening News in emotional farewells as management reshuffled talent and redefined the network’s public posture. Inside the newsroom, morale reportedly declined as staff faced uncertainty about editorial direction, layoffs, and ideological repositioning. Weiss reportedly questioned journalists about public perceptions of bias, reinforcing a top-down effort to rebrand the organization rather than engage in collective editorial deliberation.

    These developments cannot be separated from the corporate transformation of CBS’s parent company. Paramount Global has undergone a sweeping restructuring shaped by its merger with Skydance Media, led by David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison. Under this new ownership structure, CBS News has been encouraged to restore “balance” and credibility, language that often accompanies efforts to reduce investigative risk and align journalism more closely with corporate and political interests.

    At the same time, Paramount’s deal-making has intersected with elite political networks. Jared Kushner’s private equity firm was involved in related media acquisition efforts before withdrawing, highlighting the increasingly blurred lines between media ownership, political influence, and capital consolidation. In this environment, editorial independence is not abolished outright but carefully managed, constrained by the priorities of ownership and the sensitivities of power.

    What connects UATX and CBS News under Weiss’s influence is not ideology so much as structure. In both cases, authority flows upward while dissent is curated. Free inquiry is framed as a moral value but detached from democratic governance, labor protections, or accountability to those most vulnerable to institutional retaliation. Meanwhile, individuals and groups who experience genuine silencing in academia and media—adjunct faculty, student activists, labor organizers, whistleblowers, and critics of militarism or donor power—remain largely absent from this version of the free speech debate.

    This pattern is familiar within higher education. When institutions face crises of legitimacy, elites rarely pursue democratization. Instead, they create alternatives that preserve control under new branding: private institutes, donor-led centers, honors colleges, and parallel universities. Legacy media has followed a similar path, repackaging dissent while narrowing the scope of accountability.

    Bari Weiss is not an anomaly within this landscape. She is emblematic of it. Her influence reflects how “free speech” has become an aesthetic rather than a structural commitment, invoked loudly while practiced selectively.

    The danger is not that Weiss holds strong opinions. It is that her framework for free speech travels so easily across institutions precisely because it leaves their economic and power relations intact. The University of Austin does not confront the forces hollowing out higher education. CBS News, under corporate consolidation, risks muting the investigative journalism that once defined it. In both cases, freedom becomes a branding strategy rather than a democratic practice.

    For those concerned with truly independent journalism and genuinely democratic education, the lesson is clear. Speech is never just about speech. It is about ownership, power, and who bears the consequences when truth becomes inconvenient.

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  • Free speech advocates rally to support FIRE’s defense of First Amendment protections for drag shows

    Free speech advocates rally to support FIRE’s defense of First Amendment protections for drag shows

    Drag shows are inherently expressive and protected under the First Amendment. That’s what a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held back in August, reversing a district court’s decision that had upheld West Texas A&M University’s campus-wide drag show ban. 

    Yet several weeks later, the Fifth Circuit elected to vacate the panel’s decision and rehear the case en banc, meaning the full Court will consider whether the First Amendment permits government officials to ban a drag show because they disagree with the show’s message. As FIRE fights to preserve the panel’s decision upholding the right of public university students to engage in expressive conduct, a broad coalition of free speech advocates has rallied to file “friend of the court” briefs in support.

    Here’s what happened: West Texas A&M University maintains Legacy Hall as an open forum for students and the public to interact and engage in expression. FIRE’s client in this case is Spectrum WT, a long-recognized student organization that seeks to provide support for and promote acceptance of the LGBTQ+ student body. To that end, Spectrum WT hosts a wide range of campus events, both social and educational, to raise awareness of issues important to LGBTQ+ students and foster a strong sense of community and acceptance.

    The Constitution prohibits University officials from censoring student expression on campus because they happen to disagree with its underlying message.

    Several years ago, Spectrum WT began planning a charity drag performance to be held at Legacy Hall. Proceeds from the event would benefit the Trevor Project, an organization dedicated to suicide prevention in the LGBTQ+ community. 

    But eleven days before the performance’s scheduled date, the university’s President, Walter Wendler, canceled the event. In a lengthy public statement, Wendler announced that “West Texas A&M will not host a drag show on campus,” even while conceding that drag performance is “artistic expression” and that “the law of the land” requires him to let the show go on. According to Wendler, he opposes drag’s underlying “ideology,” believing it “demeans” women and that there is “no such thing” as a “harmless drag show.”

    West Texas A&M President cancels student charity drag show for second time

    West Texas A&M President Wendler enforced his unconstitutional prior restraint by canceling a student-organized charity drag show for the second time.


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    That’s when FIRE stepped in. Our country’s universities are bastions of free expression, exploration, and self-discovery. They are uniquely places where young adults may have their opinions tested and viewpoints expanded. And the Constitution prohibits university officials from censoring student expression on campus because they happen to disagree with its underlying message. 

    That was what the Fifth Circuit panel held when it heard this case on appeal. Yet several weeks later, the court decided to vacate the panel’s decision and consider the case a second time. So the fight to preserve First Amendment protections for students’ artistic performance, regardless of whether university officials agree with the message, continues.

    Last week, a bipartisan coalition of university professors, prominent legal scholars, and no fewer than thirteen organizations filed five amicus briefs in support of Spectrum WT:

    • The ACLU of Texas and Equality Texas highlight the district court’s doctrinal errors in upholding Wendler’s blanket drag ban, including the court’s failure to recognize the message, history, and context of drag performance and its reliance on a standard for protected expression the Supreme Court has explicitly rejected. As the ACLU of Texas and Equality Texas explain: “The district court’s narrowing of the First Amendment’s protective scope sets an alarming precedent, which, if left uncorrected, could extend beyond the drag performance at issue in this case.”
    • The First Amendment Lawyers Association argues that the lower court’s decision violates the “bedrock First Amendment principle” that government officials may not censor speech merely because they dislike the message. They emphasize how this violation is even more egregious in the university setting, “where speech rights are particularly important.” As FALA describes, Wendler “suppressed protected speech, impoverished public discourse, and denied students and the broader community the right to engage, critique, and learn in a free marketplace of ideas.”
    • The National Coalition Against Censorship, Dramatists Guild of America, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Fashion Law Institute, Authors Guild, Woodhull Freedom Foundation, Freedom to Read Foundation, American Booksellers Association, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State emphasize the evidence establishing that Wendler’s blanket prohibition was inherently a viewpoint-based prior restraint that finds no support in First Amendment law. They argue that Wendler’s prohibition is, in fact, “a ‘classic’ example of a prior restraint” that is “unmoored from any objective standards” constraining his censorship authority. As they explain, such prior restraints are unconstitutional as reflected in the “text, history, and tradition of the First Amendment.”
    • The CATO Institute and renowned legal scholars Eugene Volokh and Dale Carpenter describe the applicable legal doctrine to explain why it ultimately does not matter whether Legacy Hall is classified as a limited public forum or nonpublic forum: because Wendler’s viewpoint discrimination is impermissible everywhere. They argue that drag performance is clearly protected expression under the First Amendment and that Wendler violated that protection by censoring drag performance because he disagrees with its message.
    • A coalition of eight professors specializing in LGBTQ+ studies delve into the history of drag performance as artistic expression. They describe how drag has long existed as a medium to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community and defy gender norms and stereotypes. They argue that its message is unmistakable among the general public, and that Wendler’s sole motivation in censoring this artistic expression was his personal disagreement with that message.

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