The University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement held its annual virtual #SpeechMatters conference Thursday amid a speech environment that is vastly different and far more fraught than anyone could have imagined even a few months ago. The Trump administration is simultaneously punishing colleges for their failure to clamp down on pro-Palestinian protesters and detaining international students, in some cases for participating in those same protests.
In her opening remarks, Michelle Deutchman, the center’s executive director, acknowledged as much: “Today we gather at a critical moment for higher education across the nation,” she said. “The role of colleges and universities in our democracy is being questioned. Trust in institutions is shifting. The impact of a historic national election and a year of campus protests continues to unfold.”
The conference, which featured four panels and 15 speakers with expertise in free speech and higher education, covered not only campus speech but also the broader questions of trust in universities and the knowledge they produce. Here are five key takeaways from the event.
- College administrators can’t prevent the chilling effect President Trump’s actions are having on campuses.
In one session, Deutchman asked Howard Gillman, chancellor at the University of California, Irvine, for 12 years, and Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, how students can exercise their right to free speech despite the Trump administration’s crackdown on institutions and students alike for purported antisemitic speech.
Gillman and Chemerinsky found a consensus—one that contradicts the widely held belief that universities should always be forums for political discussion: As long as Trump appears to be punishing individuals for constitutionally protected speech, now may not be the time to encourage students to speak out.
“When you have an administration that has not yet been constrained by the courts sufficiently, it does create an environment where people might know they have, in theory, legal protections for the activities they engage in, but just because your activity may be protected doesn’t meant that you are not going to be put in a very complicated situation if the government does move forward,” Gillman said. “I don’t want to overstate the amount of reassurance that you can give. A chilling environment is a chilling environment.”
Chemerinsky said it wasn’t tenable to assure students that he could protect them from the federal government. One student had asked him if the law school could prevent Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from coming onto campus and detaining students, and Chemerinsky said he had to tell the student that wouldn’t be possible. (In February, Trump rolled back protections that stopped immigration enforcement actions from taking place in certain locations, including on college campuses.)
“There’s a limit to what we can do to protect students. I don’t want to ever have students have the illusion that we can do more than we can,” he said.
- Rebuilding trust in higher ed requires a fundamental shift in culture.
When discussing the lack of trust in higher education, Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a columnist for Inside Higher Ed, said the distrust exists not just between the government and colleges, or administrators and faculty, but at all levels of higher education. Students erode trust with faculty when they don’t put effort into their courses, he said. Faculty who care more about their own research and success than their students and institutions likewise fail to build trust with their students and peers. And administrators earn the faculty’s distrust by leaving them out of key decision-making processes.
It’s all a result of Americans’ shifting view of higher education from a public good to a private one, he argued, with students as the consumers and administrators as the CEOs.
“It is absolutely imperative that we rebuild trust within our campuses,” he said. “It’s not a matter of policy tweaks; it’s a matter of a fundamental cultural shift.”
He noted that in his own classes at UT Austin, he has made an effort to help students undertake real-world projects, like building an educational webpage for a local museum. Such efforts position the student not as a consumer, but as a “partner and collaborator and creator of knowledge,” he said. And it shows communities that college instills in its students important skills—and isn’t always just an amorphous ivory tower.
- Fast turnover of college leaders is contributing to the lack of public trust.
In the same panel about trust, multiple speakers touched on the fact that administrative turnover can be a major impediment to trust-building on campus.
University presidents last, on average, just over five years on the job, which means that most students see at least one presidential turnover in their college career. Each new president must rebuild trust not only with the constituents on their own campus, but also with alumni, government officials, the local community and beyond.
Short tenures also make it difficult for students and employees to buy in to key university initiatives, considering it’s not uncommon for a new president to scrap the previous administration’s projects in favor of new priorities.
“Trust is about relationships … and you don’t build trust overnight. You build trust through listening. You build trust through showing up. You build trust through showing proof points. That’s how it happens. So, you can’t build trust when you’re a president that’s been there three months,” said Bobbie Laur, president of Campus Compact, a nonprofit focused on civic and community engagement in higher education. “Some of what we’re facing is the reality of the short tenure of leaders without the necessary support structures to support leaders right now.”
Saanvi Arora, a UC Berkeley student and the executive director of the Youth Power Project, a nonprofit that encourages young people to participate in public policy, agreed, noting that she has met numerous college students who have no idea what their institution’s president looks like.
“That’s a huge problem, if you’re not meeting with students directly, showing up to spaces where it really matters for students to see you there,” she said. “It really makes a difference and moves the needle.”
- Universities need to do more to stanch the spread of misinformation.
Misinformation is pervasive in the current vitriolic political environment, according to a panel of experts, but so is anger and skepticism toward the very researchers who aim to better understand the phenomenon.
Simone Chambers, chair of political science at UC Irvine, pointed out that research shows misinformation is more likely to circulate in right-wing communities. But that research is then called partisan, sometimes even by politicians themselves; mis- and disinformation experts who studied incorrect information ahead of the 2020 election earned intense ire from congressional Republicans, who accused them of censoring free speech and subpoenaed data about what was being marked as inaccurate information.
That’s compounded by the perennial problem of most, if not all, academic research: Few people see it. Michael Wagner, who leads the Center for Communication and Civic Renewal at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said that universities could make a greater effort to get the work of misinformation researchers into the public’s hands.
Universities must do “a more aggressive job of promoting the work, even when it highlights partisan asymmetries, even when it highlights other kinds of things that might leave universities open to attack from those who don’t like the fact that universities exist,” said Wagner, who noted that his center has been subpoenaed by Congress. “[That] is something they need to do a better job of, to help the researchers who are trying to do this stuff get their work out there to folks so that they can engage with it and decide how they want to incorporate that information into how they live their lives.”
- More college leaders should stand up for higher education.
Colleges have been capitulating to the Trump administration in everything from rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion programs to, in Columbia’s case, at least, agreeing to a list of the administration’s demands in the hopes of having its federal funding unfrozen.
But a small number of college presidents—including Wesleyan University’s Michael Roth and Princeton University’s Christopher Eisgruber, who were both cited by panelists at the conference—have spoken forcefully against the Trump administration’s attacks on political speech, DEI and free scientific inquiry. In an op-ed in Slate about the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University alumnus and pro-Palestinian activist who was detained a month ago by immigration officials, Roth wrote, “University presidents must speak out against this attempt to control the political culture of our campuses from the White House. Just as we should decry antisemitism and other forms of discrimination, we should insist that students and faculty have the right to make their voices heard about the issues of the day. Neutrality here is a betrayal of our academic mission.”
Kristen Shahverdian, program director of campus free speech at PEN America, a free expression nonprofit, said she is glad she doesn’t have to be a part of any internal conversations about how a university under fire by the Trump administration will react. Still, she said, she wishes more higher education leaders would emulate Roth and Eisgruber and that the higher education sector as a whole could come together as a united front.
“There’s probably multiple reasons why they’re able to speak out and others maybe can’t,” she said. “[But] we really need to push back, to hold on to the values of higher education, which include freedom of expression and academic freedom.”
