Tag: speech

  • You can’t eliminate real-world violence by suing over online speech

    You can’t eliminate real-world violence by suing over online speech

    With so much of our national conversation taking place online, there’s an almost reflexive tendency to search for online causes — and online solutions — when tragedy strikes in the physical world. The murder of Charlie Kirk was no exception. Almost immediately, many (some in good faith, and others decidedly less so) began to postulate about the role played by online rhetoric and polarization.

    Taking the stage at Utah Valley University to discuss political violence last week, Sens. Mark Kelly and John Curtis shared the view that social media platforms are fueling “radicalization” and violence through their content-recommendation algorithms. And they previewed their proposed solution: a bill that would strip platforms of Section 230 protections whenever their algorithms “amplify content that caused harm.”

    This week, the senators unveiled the Algorithm Accountability Act. In a nutshell, the bill would require social media platforms to “exercise reasonable care” to prevent their algorithms from contributing to foreseeable bodily injury or death, whether the user is the victim or the perpetrator. A platform that fails to do so would lose Section 230’s critical protection against being treated as the publisher of user-generated content — and injured parties could sue the platform for violating this “duty of care.”

    The debate over algorithmic content recommendation has been going on for years. Lower courts have almost universally held that Section 230 immunizes social media platforms from lawsuits claiming that algorithmic recommendation of harmful content contributed to terrorist attacks, mass shootings, and racist attacks. When faced with the question in 2023, the Supreme Court declined to rule on the scope of Section 230 — opting instead to hold the claims of algorithmic aiding and abetting at issue would not survive either way.

    Forcing social media platforms to do the dirty work of censorship on pain of expensive litigation and expansive liability is no less offensive to the First Amendment than a direct government speech regulation.

    But there’s an important question that usually gets lost in the heated debate over Section 230: Would such lawsuits be viable even if they could be brought?

    In a Wall Street Journal op-ed making the case for his bill, Sen. Curtis wrote, “We hold pharmaceutical companies accountable when their products cause injury. There is no reason Big Tech should be treated differently.”

    At first blush, this argument has an instinctive appeal. But it ultimately dooms itself because there is a reason to treat social media platforms differently. That reason is the First Amendment, which enshrines a constitutional right to free speech — a protection not shared by prescription drugs.

    Perhaps anticipating this point, Sen. Curtis argues that the Algorithm Accountability Act poses no threat to free speech: “Free speech means you can say what you want in the digital town square. Social-media companies host that town square, but algorithms rearrange it.” But free speech doesn’t only protect users’ right to post online free of government censorship; it also protects the editorial decisions of those that host those posts — including algorithmic “rearranging,” to use the senator’s phrase. As the Supreme Court recently affirmed in Moody v. NetChoice:

    When the platforms use their Standards and Guidelines to decide which third-party content those feeds will display, or how the display will be ordered and organized, they are making expressive choices. And because that is true, they receive First Amendment protection.

    The “rearranging” of speech is just as protected as the speech itself, as when a newspaper decides which stories to print on the front page and which letters to the editor to publish. That is no less true for social media platforms. In fact, the term “content-recommendation algorithm” itself points to its expressive nature. Recommending something is a message — “I think you would find this interesting.”

    The Moody Court also acknowledged the expressive nature of arranging online content (emphasis added): “Deciding on the third-party speech that will be included in or excluded from a compilation — and then organizing and presenting the included items — is expressive activity of its own.” Similarly, while dismissing exactly the kind of case the Algorithm Accountability Act would enable, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held this past February: “Facebook’s decision[s] to recommend certain third-party content to specific users . . . are traditional editorial functions of publishers, notwithstanding the various methods they use in performing” them.

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    So the First Amendment is at least implicated when Congress institutes “accountability” for a platform’s arrangement and presentation of user-generated content, unlike with pharmaceutical safety regulations. But does it prohibit Congress from imposing the kind of liability the Algorithm Accountability Act creates?

    Yes. Two well-established principles explain why.

    First: As the Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear, imposing civil liability for protected speech raises serious First Amendment concerns.

    Second: Except for the exceedingly narrow category of incitement — where the speaker intended to spur imminent unlawful action by saying something that was likely to cause such action — the First Amendment demands that we hold the wrongdoer accountable for their own conduct, not the people whose words they may have encountered along the way.

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit concisely explained why these principles preclude liability for “negligently” conveying “harmful” ideas:

    If the shield of the first amendment can be eliminated by providing after publication that an article discussing a dangerous idea negligently helped bring about a real injury simply because the idea can be identified as ‘bad,’ all free speech becomes threatened.

    In other words, faced with a broad, unmeetable duty to anticipate and prevent ideas from causing harm, media would be chilled into publishing, broadcasting, or distributing only the safest and most anodyne material to avoid the risk of unpredictable liability.

    For this reason, courts have — for nearly a century — steadfastly refused to impose a duty of care to prevent harms from speech. A few noteworthy examples are illustrative:

    • Dismissing a lawsuit alleging that CBS’ television programming desensitized a child to violence and led him to shoot and kill his elderly neighbor, one federal court wrote of the duty of care sought by the plaintiffs:

    The impositions pregnant in such a standard are awesome to consider . . . Indeed, it is implicit in the plaintiffs’ demand for a new duty standard, that such a claim should exist for an untoward reaction on the part of any ‘susceptible’ person. The imposition of such a generally undefined and undefinable duty would be an unconstitutional exercise by this Court in any event.

    • In a case brought by the victim of a gruesome attack alleging that NBC knew of studies on child violence putting them on notice that some viewers might imitate violence portrayed on screen, the court ruled:

    [T]he chilling effect of permitting negligence actions for a television broadcast is obvious. . . . The deterrent effect of subjecting [them] to negligence liability because of their programming choices would lead to self-censorship which would dampen the vigor and limit the variety of public debate.

    • Affirming dismissal of a lawsuit alleging that Ozzy Osbourne’s Suicide Solution caused a minor to kill himself, the court noted the profound chilling effect such liability would cause:

    [I]t is simply not acceptable to a free and democratic society to impose a duty upon performing artists to limit and restrict the dissemination of ideas in artistic speech which may adversely affect emotionally troubled individuals. Such a burden would quickly have the effect of reducing and limiting artistic expression to only the broadest standard of taste and acceptance and the lowest level of offense, provocation and controversy.

    • When the family of a teacher killed in a school shooting sued makers and distributors of violent video games and movies, the court rejected the premise of the suit:

    Given the First Amendment values at stake, the magnitude of the burden that Plaintiffs seek to impose on the Video Game and Movie Defendants is daunting. Furthermore, the practical consequences of such liability are unworkable. Plaintiffs would essentially obligate these Defendants, indeed all speakers, to anticipate and prevent the idiosyncratic, violent reactions of unidentified, vulnerable individuals to their creative works.

    In his op-ed, Sen. Curtis wrote, “The problem isn’t what users say, but how algorithms shape and weaponize it.” But the “problem” this bill seeks to remedy very much is what users say. A content recommendation algorithm in isolation can’t cause any harm; it’s the recommendation of certain kinds of content (e.g., radicalizing, polarizing, etc.) that the bill seeks to stymie.

    And that content is overwhelmingly protected by the First Amendment, regardless of whether the posts might, individually or in the aggregate, cause an individual to commit violence. When the City of Indianapolis created remedies for people who viewed pornography, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected the municipality’s justification that pornography “perpetuate[s] subordination” and leads to cognizable societal and personal harms:

    [T]his simply demonstrates the power of pornography as speech. All of these unhappy effects depend on mental intermediation. Pornography affects how people see the world, their fellows, and social relations. If pornography is what pornography does, so is other speech.

    [ . . . ]

    Racial bigotry, anti-semitism, violence on television, reporters’ biases — these and many more influence the culture and shape our socialization. None is directly answerable by more speech, unless that speech too finds its place in the popular culture. Yet all is protected as speech, however insidious. Any other answer leaves the government in control of all of the institutions of culture, the great censor and director of which thoughts are good for us.

    And that’s why the Algorithm Accountability Act also threatens users’ expressive rights. There’s simply no reliable way to predict whether any given post might, somewhere down the line, factor into someone else’s independent decision to commit violence — especially at the scale of modern social media. Faced with liability for guessing wrong, platforms will effectively have two realistic choices: aggressively re-engineer their algorithms to bury anything that could possibly be deemed divisive (and therefore risky), or — far more likely — simply ban all such content entirely. Either road leads to the same place: a shrunken public square where whole neighborhoods of protected speech have been bulldozed.


    WATCH VIDEO: A warning label on social media? | So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast

    “What a State may not constitutionally bring about by means of a criminal statute,” the Supreme Court famously wrote in New York Times v. Sullivan, “is likewise beyond the reach of its civil law.” Forcing social media platforms to do the dirty work of censorship on pain of expensive litigation and expansive liability is no less offensive to the First Amendment than a direct government speech regulation.

    Political violence is a real and pressing problem. But history has already taught us that trying to scrub away every potential downstream harm of speech is a dead end. And a system of free speech requires us to abstain from the temptation of trying in the first place.

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  • NEW HIGH: 3/4 of Americans say free speech is headed in the wrong direction

    NEW HIGH: 3/4 of Americans say free speech is headed in the wrong direction

    PHILADELPHIA, Nov. 13, 2025 — A new poll from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression finds that a record number of Americans now believe that freedom of speech in the country is headed in the wrong direction.

    The quarterly National Speech Index tracks changing attitudes toward free speech among the American public over time. Since its inception in January 2024, the NSI has asked respondents, “When it comes to whether people are able to freely express their views do you think things in America are heading in the RIGHT or WRONG direction?”

    A staggering 74% of Americans in the October edition of the NSI responded that things are headed in the wrong direction for free speech, compared to only 26% who believe things are headed in the right direction. This represents a 10-point jump since the previous July survey.

    Notably, drops in confidence across all political parties contributed to the record-levels of pessimism. From July of this year, Democrats who think things are heading in the right direction fell from 17% to 11%, Independents fell from 31% to 19%, and Republicans fell from 69% to 55%.

    “In the last three months, America watched as Charlie Kirk was murdered for simply debating on a college campus, followed immediately by a wave of censorship of those who opposed his views,” said FIRE Research Fellow & Polling Manager Nathan Honeycutt. “It’s no surprise that a record number of Americans of all parties now think that it’s a dire time for free speech in America.”

    To test support for academic freedom in the aftermath of the Kirk shooting, the October NSI also asked respondents about four politically charged — but constitutionally protected — remarks made by a professor on social media following the shooting. For each statement, majorities of Americans said the professor should not be fired. But their level of support varied by the statement, and substantial minorities in each case reported that the professor “probably” or “definitely” should be fired.

    • 45% say a professor who posted “It’s O.K. to punch a Nazi” should probably or definitely be fired from their job.
    • 37% say a professor who posted “These fascist Bible-thumpers want to drag us back to the Dark Ages” should probably or definitely be fired from their job.
    • 24% say a professor who posted “Our colleges and universities are progressive indoctrination centers” should probably or definitely be fired from their job.
    • 14% say that a professor who posted “We are going to make America great again” should probably or definitely be fired from their job.
    Percentage of Americans who said a professor should be fired if they said the following on social media after Charlie Kirk’s assassination: (Bar Chart)

    “Americans were most divided on the statement supporting political violence, but it’s heartening that most Americans correctly backed academic freedom,” said FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens. “On the other hand, it’s deeply concerning that we intentionally included some rather tame political statements — including the winning slogan of the last presidential election — and vocal minorities still called for the professor’s firing.”

    Overall, Americans view political violence as a problem across the ideological spectrum, with only modest differences in responses when asked about different ideologies. 57% of respondents said they agreed at least somewhat with the statement “Political violence is a problem among progressives.” But 56% said the same of conservatives, and 58% said they agreed at least somewhat that political violence was a problem across all political groups.

    “Americans seem to recognize that political violence isn’t a partisan problem — it’s a national one,” said Honeycutt. “Our polling suggests that the public is less interested in pointing fingers and more interested in fixing the toxic culture of hostility in our politics.”

    FIRE also asked for the first time several questions about “jawboning,” the unconstitutional practice in which the government censors by pressuring private actors to silence speech. Around half of Americans said they were “very” or “extremely” concerned about the government pressuring social media companies (53%), video platforms (50%), or private broadcast companies (52%) to remove content based on the ideology expressed.

    Slightly less, 46%, said they were very or extremely concerned about the federal government pressuring banks to disaffiliate with groups or individuals because of their viewpoints, a practice also known as “debanking.” 35% said they were very or extremely concerned about the federal government pressuring tech companies to remove misinformation from internet search results.

    Percentage of Americans who are concerned about the federal government pressuring ... (Bar Chart)

    “Americans are deeply concerned about jawboning — and they’re right to be,” said FIRE Legislative Director Carolyn Iodice. “Both parties have been guilty in recent years of using government pressure to silence speech. This isn’t a partisan issue; it’s a constitutional one.”

    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 October 2025 National Speech Index sampled 1,000 Americans and was conducted from October 20 to 28. The survey’s margin of error is +/- 3.0%.

    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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  • Snipers, censorship, and unaccountability: Indiana University’s free speech crisis

    Snipers, censorship, and unaccountability: Indiana University’s free speech crisis

    “I had a sniper gun pointed at me when trying to defend a protest that was in compliance with school policies.”

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    The student who wrote that line in FIRE’s annual free speech survey wasn’t using a metaphor. They were describing a spring afternoon in 2024 at Indiana University’s Dunn Meadow — a campus green with a lineage of protest dating to the anti-apartheid “shantytowns” of the 1980s — when officers with rifles took positions on the roof of the Indiana Memorial Union over the heads of student protesters. Indiana State Police later confirmed they had positioned officers “with sniper capabilities” on rooftops.

    The night before, administrators had convened an ad hoc meeting that rewrote IU’s Outdoor Spaces policy to require approval for structures that had long been permitted. By morning, a peaceful protest was recast as a policy violation. By noon, state police had taken a “closed sniper position” above the lawn. 

    Police arrested dozens of students and faculty over two days, and many received one‑year campus bans later challenged in court. Ultimately, the Monroe County Prosecutor’s office dropped the “constitutionally dubious” charges. FIRE wrote IU leadership objecting to the eleventh‑hour policy change and the resulting crackdown, warning IU that manipulating rules to curtail disfavored protest is incompatible with a public university’s First Amendment obligations.

    For a university whose motto celebrates “light and truth,” the optics were unmissable: IU had turned its own tradition of protest into grounds for punishment. Unfortunately, it wasn’t an isolated incident, but a warning for what would follow.

    Act now: Condemn Indiana University’s censorship of student media

    Indiana University fired its student media adviser for refusing to censor the student paper, then banned the paper’s print edition.


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    The atmosphere that spring clarified what faculty had been saying in whispered discontent for years: academic freedom and shared governance were being treated as obstacles to be managed. On April 16, 2024, nearly 1,000 faculty came together for an unprecedented meeting where 93% of those present voted no confidence in IU’s leadership. At the time, FIRE noted that the no‑confidence movement explicitly cited encroachments on academic freedom and viewpoint discrimination concerns.

    One flashpoint was the university’s handling of associate professor Abdulkader Sinno, suspended from teaching and advising in December 2023 after a dispute over a room reservation — the registered student group he had advised being none other than the Palestine Solidarity Committee. FIRE went on record with a reminder that public universities must not punish faculty for facilitating student expression or for the viewpoints associated with that expression.

    Another flashpoint was art. In December 2023, IU’s Eskenazi Museum abruptly canceled a long‑planned retrospective of Palestinian‑American painter Samia Halaby, notifying the artist her work would no longer be shown in a terse letter curtailing three years of preparation. IU invoked concerns about security and the “integrity of the exhibit.” But as FIRE explained, public institutions cannot cancel art because the artist’s politics are unpopular or because controversy is inconvenient. 

    Meanwhile, cancellations migrated into other corners of campus life. In January 2025, the IU School of Medicine canceled its LGBTQ+ Health Care Conference, initially offering only a bare note on the website. Administrators later cited pending legislation as the reason. One invited keynote speaker, journalist Chris Geidner, publicly confirmed the cancellation. As FIRE frequently reminds universities, preemptively shutting down academic programming due to political headwinds chills debate and undermines academic freedom. Universities exist to give ideas a platform, not to turn them away.

    IU’s Israel-Palestine-related cancellations didn’t run in only one political direction, either. In March 2024, IU officials urged IU Hillel to postpone an event with Mosab Hassan Yousef, a prominent pro‑Israel activist and Hamas critic, citing security threats. Instead of securing the event, IU “postponed” it, but apparently never rescheduled.

    By the publication of FIRE’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings, the numbers matched the mood. Indiana University ranked 255th out of 257 institutions surveyed, making it the worst‑ranked public university in America, with bottom‑tier scores in openness, administrative support, and comfort expressing ideas. Roughly one in four IU students reported discipline or threats of discipline for their expression, and nearly three‑quarters of faculty said the administration does not protect academic freedom. 

    This fall, IU’s crackdown reached the newsroom. Student editors at the Indiana Daily Student ran two straightforward, newsworthy pieces: one on IU’s suspension of the Palestine Solidarity Committee, another on IU’s abysmal free‑speech ranking. Students say Media School Dean David Tolchinsky pressed them to suppress the coverage. When they refused, the university ordered the paper’s print edition halted just before homecoming. 

    Control at an editorially independent student paper belongs to the students, not to administrators.

    When Jim Rodenbush, the director of student media, declined to enforce content restrictions, he was fired. FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative immediately wrote IU on Oct. 16, condemning the firing as apparent retaliation and the print‑ban directive as unconstitutional censorship by a public university. The students’ response captured the stakes: an image of an empty newspaper rack on campus captioned with a single word in block letters, “CENSORED.”

    IU has since reversed the print shutdown amid national outcry and a federal lawsuit filed by Rodenbush. The chancellor has authorized IDS to print through June 30, 2026, within budget parameters. FIRE’s position remains: Control at an editorially independent student paper belongs to the students, not to administrators.

    Seen together — the midnight rule change at Dunn Meadow, the snipers on the roof, the faculty’s 93% vote of no confidence, the sanctioning of a professor for defending a student group’s right to meet, the cancellation of an artist’s exhibit, the quiet erasure of a healthcare conference, the postponement of a controversial speaker under the elastic banner of security, and finally the order to stop the presses — it is clear Indiana University has a crisis on its hands. This is a campus where students practice self‑silencing to survive the semester, where faculty measure every sentence against the week’s political weather, where the oxygen of inquiry thins until only the safest words remain.

    Today — Monday, Nov. 10 — FIRE answers in one forum the university can’t control: the public square. Our first billboard went up in Bloomington this morning. It’s stark — black, white, and FIRE red — and it names the problem plainly, pointing readers to see the record for themselves. 

    IU has a chance here to do the right thing, but if they don’t, more boards will follow, put up in places where IU’s leaders, alumni, and visitors will pass them on their way to games and meetings and flights. The point is not spectacle but accountability: to hold a mirror up to a public university that has tried, repeatedly, to dodge the image it has made for itself.

    The first billboard in FIRE’s campaign, installed in Bloomington on Monday, Nov. 10, 2025

    FIRE doesn’t launch campaigns like this to score points. We’re launching this campaign because IU, a taxpayer‑funded institution, has betrayed its public duty, believing it doesn’t need to answer to the Constitution or the consequences of ignoring the First Amendment. 

    Any university that posts sharpshooters over a peaceful protest, cancels art for its connotations, shutters a conference because of its politics, and then turns around and tells student journalists they can’t print the truth about any one of these stories hasn’t merely lost its way. It has chosen a different map — one that trades the honest noise of debate for the chilling silence of control. That’s not how we do things in America. 

    What the hell is going on at Indiana University?

    Indiana University just banned its student paper for reporting its awful free speech ranking. You literally can’t make this up.


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    The rifles are gone from the roof now, but the memory of their presence is as much a part of Dunn Meadow as the grass. The empty newspaper racks may soon be refilled, but national headlines about a campus with no newspaper endure like a warning label.

    Indiana University’s leaders have a choice to make.

    They can continue to censor and pretend it’s not a problem. Or, they can acknowledge what these last 20 months have made obvious and begin to repair what fear has fractured. They can ensure student and faculty speech is not micromanaged, that journalists report without preclearance, that art hangs because it is art, and that a university’s purpose is not to avoid controversy but to teach, especially when the debate is loud and the issue is of great public importance.

    We’re calling on IU to issue a public statement acknowledging its violations of students’ and faculty members’ free speech rights and to meet with FIRE’s experts to begin improving its ranking. Reinstating Rodenbush would also be a meaningful first step in demonstrating that IU is serious about addressing its free speech problems.

    Until then, we’ll keep telling this story where it cannot be edited away — on screens, on pages, and, starting today, on the unmissable canvases that rise beside Indiana’s roads.

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  • 5 laws FIRE wants on the books to protect free speech

    5 laws FIRE wants on the books to protect free speech

    Even with the robust protections offered to us by the First Amendment and the decades of decisions made by our federal and Supreme courts, defending free speech is still difficult business. Infringements on our rights often take advantage of loopholes and gaps in our legal frameworks, leading to actions — particularly from those in power — that violate our expressive rights and chill free speech.

    That’s why FIRE has long championed a variety of proposals to help safeguard free expression from government attacks and abuse, including federal legislation. But what would that legislation look like?

    Here are five legislative proposals FIRE has recommended to Congress to bolster free speech rights for everyone and make censorship by federal officials more difficult — no matter what party is in power.

    Improve transparency and accountability for jawboning 

    “Jawboning” refers to situations in which a government official informally coerces a private party to censor constitutionally protected speech. 

    For example, when the head of New York’s Department of Financial Services threatened to wield her regulatory powers over several insurance companies unless they stopped doing business with the National Rifle Association — because she didn’t like its viewpoint — that was textbook jawboning. The NRA sued, and the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that these acts, if proven, are unconstitutional.

    More recently, when FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened Disney and ABC over talk show host Jimmy Kimmel’s comments regarding the Charlie Kirk assassination, leading to Kimmel’s suspension, that was also a clear case of jawboning. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

    Jawboning is a growing threat to free speech as more discourse happens on social media, where the government can reach out to platforms behind closed doors and censor speech without anyone else — including the speaker — knowing the government was involved. When this happens, civil society and the public cannot track what’s happening or adequately respond. Often, it’s only through the leaks of information after the fact that we even become aware it happened at all, as we saw with the Twitter Files.

    What is jawboning? And does it violate the First Amendment?

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    As we’ll get into more deeply below, we’d like to see legislation to help deter these kinds of First Amendment violations, including jawboning, by allowing people to sue federal officials for damages when they violate constitutional rights.

    However, for this to be effective against jawboning on social media platforms, we will need greater transparency into the government’s communications with tech companies. To achieve that, FIRE recommends Congress pass legislation to require federal officials to publicly report their communications with social media companies about user content on their platforms. One option is FIRE’s Social Media Administrative Reporting Transparency (or SMART) Act, which accompanied our Report on Social Media.

    By forcing officials to either hold off on jawboning or do it out in public, where they’ll be subject to scrutiny and possible damage awards, we can curb backdoor censorship. 

    Codify First Amendment protections on campus

    FIRE also recommends Congress pass the Respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act, or similar campus speech legislation, to better protect First Amendment rights at public universities by putting existing constitutional protections into federal statute. 

    This includes ending “free speech zones,” where speech is restricted campuswide except for small, designated areas — often remote and easily ignored — effectively nullifying student expression. It also includes the prohibition of excessive security fees that colleges sometimes impose on events involving controversial speakers, as a thinly veiled attempt to stop the event from happening.

    Free Speech Zones

    Free speech zones limit expressive activity to small and/or out-of-the-way areas. They are usually unconstitutional on college campuses.


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    We’ve also long supported legislative efforts to rectify the Department of Education’s abuse of antidiscrimination law to suppress protected speech. One important thing Congress can do is to codify the Supreme Court’s Davis standard for when peer-on-peer harassment creates a hostile environment in violation of federal civil rights laws, including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, or its sister statute, Title IX. Under Davis, protected speech only rises to a violation of these statutes if it is:

    So severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, and . . . so undermines and detracts from the victims’ educational experience, that the victim-students are effectively denied equal access to an institution’s resources and opportunities.

    The Education Department under both Presidents Obama and Biden explicitly claimed that Davis did not apply to its regulatory activities (only to civil lawsuits brought under federal antidiscrimination laws). Nor is the Trump administration following Davis in its Title VI enforcement efforts. Instead, under each administration, the Education Department has concocted similar-sounding standards that (unlike Davis) can allow a single instance of protected speech to violate Title VI or IX. This pressures schools to suppress any speech that is deemed hurtful to protected groups, leading campuses to commit an endless stream of free speech violations. The Davis standard prevents this while still ensuring the Department can address actual, undeniable discriminatory harassment.

    We also recommend pairing the Davis codification with a codification of religion as a protected class under Title VI, and codification of longstanding federal guidance that says Jewish students and other groups of shared ethnicity can avail themselves of Title VI, based on its protections against discrimination on the basis of national origin. Taking these steps would create another protection against genuine student harassment without infringing on other students’ free speech rights.

    Let people sue federal officials for damages when they violate constitutional rights

    Much of the censorship federal officials engage in is already illegal. In many cases, these officials are committing straightforward constitutional and statutory violations, and asserting authority that they simply don’t have. 

    When state officials violate constitutional rights, including under the First Amendment, victims can sue them to obtain monetary damages and can collect attorneys’ fees. This provides a direct, personal incentive for state officials to respect Americans’ rights.

    Unfortunately, that doesn’t exist at the federal level. Federal officials can only be sued to get the violations to stop, not to actually get compensation or accountability. This gives officials an incentive to continue their unconstitutional behavior because they have no skin in the game. They may be stopped after the fact, but they aren’t personally deterred from committing the violation in the first place.

    FIRE recommends Congress pass legislation to let people sue for damages when federal officials violate someone’s constitutional rights. This would create a stronger incentive for federal officials to respect Americans’ rights by giving victims teeth when fighting back.

    Create strong anti-SLAPP rules in federal court

    A strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP, is a frivolous lawsuit someone files in order to punish a critic or opponent for their speech. The idea of a SLAPP is not to win on the merits of the case, but to retaliate against someone exercising their First Amendment rights. People who engage in SLAPPs do this by dragging their targets through a costly court process, or getting them to settle and retract their speech to avoid such costs. 

    Too often, the powerful use SLAPPs to send a clear, speech-chilling message: “Speak out against me, and I will ruin you.”

    Most of these lawsuits come from private individuals and corporations, but lawsuits by government officials against their critics — including news outlets — have also become a problem in recent years. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, for example, filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News in June, arguing that host Jesse Watters “misleadingly edited a video” to claim that Newsom lied about a phone call he’d had with President Trump. Or consider President Trump’s $15 million suit, filed last month against Penguin Random House and The New York Times for news articles he claims were designed to limit his prospects in the 2024 presidential election.

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    Many states have passed robust protections against SLAPPs, which speed up the process to dismiss frivolous cases and require the person who filed the SLAPP to pay the other side’s attorneys’ fees. However, plaintiffs can often evade state anti-SLAPP laws by filing in federal court. FIRE recommends Congress pass a federal anti-SLAPP law to plug that gap.

    Remove the FCC’s ability to regulate broadcast content

    Last, but certainly not least, FIRE also recommends Congress pass legislation to clarify that the FCC has no authority to regulate content on broadcast TV and radio.

    In every other medium of communication, the First Amendment bars the government from regulating the content of protected speech unless the action can survive strict constitutional scrutiny. Broadcast TV and radio, however, have been treated somewhat differently. Because the “airwaves” were historically seen as a finite resource, and one of only a small number of ways to share speech with a mass audience, the Supreme Court allowed the FCC to engage in some regulation of content by broadcasters.

    But that leeway has always been minimal, and the Communications Act specifically denies the FCC the power of censorship. Courts over the past five decades have also grown increasingly skeptical of the few areas of content regulation that were considered permissible. Recently, FCC officials have ignored these developments and mischaracterized the FCC’s “public interest” authority as a blank check to regulate content. It isn’t — and never was.

    Congress can play an important role by clarifying that the “scarcity rationale,” which was originally thought to support different constitutional treatment for the broadcast medium, has long since been eclipsed by technological changes. It actually said so once before, when it adopted the Telecommunications Act of 1996, but it should be more explicit this time by also deleting the few areas where the statute authorizes content regulation.

    This should make clear that recent examples of the FCC’s misuse of the public interest standard are being beyond its authority. A prime instance of this is Chairman Carr’s invocation of the public interest standard to threaten ABC over the content of Jimmy Kimmel’s speech. This would also make clear that historic examples, such as the Democratic National Committee’s campaign during the Kennedy administration of filing FCC complaints to silence conservative radio commenters, were illegitimate.

    Carr’s threats to ABC are jawboning any way you slice it

    ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel hours after FCC Chair Brendan Carr suggested they could face consequences for remarks Kimmel made in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder.


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    Another recent example of the FCC’s weaponization of its authorities is the FCC’s various actions to dust off an obscure policy against “news distortion” as a way to oversee broadcasters’ editorial judgments. As FIRE has noted in an FCC filing, that policy, originally designed to address “deliberate distortion or staging” of news events, was almost never invoked or enforced. That is for good reason: FCC commissioners understood that the commission could not function as the nation’s speech police. And until the past few months, the commission realized both the Communications Act and the First Amendment barred any attempt to revitalize the news distortion policy. Congress should remind the FCC of that fact.

    Earlier this year, FIRE filed a comment encouraging the FCC to withdraw these and all of its other content-based regulations. A few of those regulations are required by federal law, and so it’s up to Congress to repeal them. Others are just within the FCC’s interpretation of its authority. To address those, we recommend Congress explicitly bar the FCC from regulating any constitutionally protected content.

    Why this matters now, and why it will always matter

    The bottom line with all of these proposed laws is simple: we must limit the government’s power to censor either directly or indirectly.

    Although free speech issues are getting more attention this year as a result of the current administration’s actions, the threats these laws are designed to address began before our current political turmoil, and will continue long after it ends — unless Congress steps in to do something about it. Our goal is not to merely prevent one side or the other from abusing their power and targeting protected speech; it is to prevent any administration from doing so. This approach is the only way to successfully protect our First Amendment rights and the democratic culture it is meant to preserve.

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  • Princeton president misunderstands FIRE data — and campus free speech

    Princeton president misunderstands FIRE data — and campus free speech

    The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one. In his new book Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber reports on FIRE’s data on free speech and First Amendment norms on campus while making no effort to understand it and misusing the data of others. In other words, he’s skipped that first step — and now Princeton is tumbling down the staircase. 

    Eisgruber’s book makes many questionable claims, from dismissing good-faith critiques to muddying examples of censorship. But for our purposes here, let’s cabin our criticism to the nine pages of Chapter 5 that he devotes to dismissing data, including FIRE’s.

    Our research

    FIRE’s research — like all research — is imperfect, and we welcome criticism. Research isn’t about proving you’re right. It’s about stress-testing ideas to see what holds up. Scrutiny is how the process works, and it’s how the work gets better. 

    Our largest and most ambitious annual research project is the College Free Speech Rankings, which combines three factors: written speech policies, a national survey of student views on campus free expression, and outcomes from campus speech controversies. Reasonable minds can differ on how to weigh these factors, which is why we make all our data available to anyone who requests it. If someone believes these factors should be weighed differently, or has different factors they would like to include, they are welcome to do so, and to use our data.

    College Free Speech Rankings

    The College Free Speech Rankings is a comprehensive comparison of the student experience of free speech on their campuses.


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    We’re also transparent about our methodology. This year, we preregistered our methodology before our survey data came back, in part to make clear that we do not — and cannot — reverse-engineer outcomes to put certain schools on top or bottom.

    Every year when we release the report, we get feedback. We take the thoughtful critiques seriously and have often used them to improve our work. Again, feedback is part of the process. But not all feedback comes from a place of good faith.

    Bias or projection?

    Eisgruber introduces FIRE in a manner intended to discredit us, but that probably ends up saying more about his biases than any of ours:

    An organization called FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) has probably done as much as any other entity to create the impression that free speech is under continuous assault on college campuses. FIRE is a nonprofit advocacy organization that describes itself as defending free speech and free thought for all Americans; it was founded in 1999 with a focus on campus speech issues and now receives a substantial portion of its funding from foundations often associated with conservative political causes.

    Eisgruber provides no footnote explaining or citing the conservative foundations to which he objects, when the “now” period started, or how “substantial” are those alleged funds. In reality, FIRE is funded by a very politically diverse cohort, and in the last fiscal year, 74% of our funding came from individual donors compared to 26% from foundation grants.

    Eisgruber’s implication is that FIRE is biased towards conservatives because we have conservative donors. (So does Princeton, and few would accuse it of being politically conservative.) He has to rely on these vague implications because if you look at the evidence, you have to contend with FIRE’s many cases on behalf of liberal students and professors. Or our lawsuit against the Trump administration. Or against the governments of Texas and Florida, in which we succeeded in blocking speech restrictions passed by deep-red legislatures.

    If he actually had any evidence that donors were influencing our research or casework, he’d have shown it. And with regard to our research, if the methodology and procedures are solid, it wouldn’t even matter if we were conservative, liberal, or from another planet entirely. If someone you hate tells you the sky is blue, the fact that you don’t like them is irrelevant to the truth or falsity of their statements. So he’s just tossing out the accusation and hoping that’s enough to bias his audience against us in the section that follows.

    Eisgruber then brings up FIRE’s supposed bias to praise another group’s research in a similar vein about free expression in the University of North Carolina system (more on that later):

    Unlike at FIRE and its kin, the researchers brought no discernible ideological or advocacy agenda to their work: The three original collaborators on the project included one self-identified conservative (McNeilly) and one self-identified liberal (Larson).

    If he had bothered to fact-check this claim by contacting FIRE, he would have found that our research department and those of us who work on the rankings share at least that level of political diversity (as does FIRE as a whole)! As for their indiscernible advocacy agenda, he may have missed their excellent recommendations for free expression:

    In sum, we recommend that efforts to improve the campus culture for free expression and constructive dialogue be holistic and attentive to the diverse contexts in which students encounter politics. Tangibly, we suggest that the UNC system encourage researchers from member institutions to review these data, conduct their own analyses, and develop campus-specific plans for creating and evaluating their own interventions.

    As agendas go, that’s a praiseworthy one to have, but it is an agenda.

    But while Eisgruber is quick to baselessly accuse FIRE of bias, in all his discussion of our findings, he never once pauses to consider his own biases. His defense of the status quo for free speech on campus is, not coincidentally, a defense of his own record as president. That’s a pretty big blind spot, and it shows. Even worse, his desire to justify himself leads to some exceptionally lazy takes on our research. 

    When ‘it’s not clear’ really means ‘I didn’t bother to look into it’

    Eisgruber takes issue with the methodology of FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database. He notes that before 2024, it was called the Disinvitation Database, and adds a footnote: “It is not clear what changed when the database expanded.” That’s not even close to correct, as we published a complete explanation about the changes on Feb. 8, 2024. It would be absurd for us to completely overhaul the methodology and purpose of our database without explaining those changes somewhere. That’s why we did explain it. He could have found this out with a simple Google search.

    One might be forgiven for missing this kind of mistake when writing a critique on X. It’s less excusable in the context of a book, for which he presumably had research assistance and certainly had an editor. (Or did he? Curiously, the same footnote also says that the database was “accessed November 17, 2025,” which, at the time of this writing, has not yet occurred.)

    As for the substance of his critique, Eisgruber calls the database a “hot mess,” claiming our inclusion criteria are too broad and that we “[conflate] disinvitation with deplatforming and censorship.” He never defines these terms, so it’s hard to know what distinction he thinks we missed. His example? He cites as “absurd” our decision to classify as a disinvitation attempt a situation in which NYU students tried to replace their commencement speaker, former Princeton President Shirley Tilghman, with someone more famous, followed by several similar efforts at Princeton.

    Reasonable minds can disagree on what such episodes mean, but by our stated methodology, they clearly count as deplatforming attempts: 

    A deplatforming attempt . . . is an attempt to prevent someone from expressing themselves in a public forum on campus. Deplatforming attempts include attempts to disinvite speakers from campus speeches or commencement ceremonies.

    That definition is public and consistent. It doesn’t depend on some subjective criterion for how “bad” we or Eisgruber think an incident was, or how justified students felt in opposing it. If Eisgruber wants to challenge our data, he could propose his own definition and see what share of our dataset fits it. Instead, he cherry-picks anecdotes he happens not to care about, and conveniently ignores more egregious examples.

    He also objects to the idea that disinvitations — even successful ones — can threaten free speech, arguing that FIRE “confuses the exercise of free speech with threats to free speech.” But that’s a false dichotomy. The exercise of free speech can absolutely threaten others’ ability to speak.

    As FIRE has noted on many occasions, calls for disinvitation are themselves protected speech — so are calls for violence in response to speech that don’t meet the bar for incitement. 

    Eisgruber agrees with FIRE that shoutdowns are never acceptable and are incompatible with free speech. But it’s hard to reconcile that with his position that disinvitation attempts can never threaten free speech. They often involve appeals to university authorities to shut down an event or speech. In other words, they are attempts by one group of people to decide for their peers what speech their peers will be able to hear, similar to a heckler’s veto.

    Eisgruber also presents a heckler’s veto from 1970 that doesn’t appear in our database, as if to prove that campus illiberalism didn’t start with Gen Z. Believe me, we’re aware. We’ve written plenty about McCarthy-era censorship and the Red Scare. Plus, FIRE was founded back in 1999, long before today’s version of the culture wars. Illiberalism on campus isn’t new, and we certainly wouldn’t argue that it is new after 25 years of fighting it. It just takes different forms in different eras — and we track it wherever it appears. The reason Eisgruber’s example wasn’t included in our database is simply that we made the decision to limit the database to incidents that occurred since FIRE’s founding.

    REPORT: Faculty members more likely to self-censor today than during McCarthy era

    Today, one in four faculty say they’re very or extremely likely to self-censor in academic publications, and over one in three do so during interviews or lectures — more than during and Second Red Scare and McCarthyism.


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    He praises Princeton for not having given in to a heckler’s veto since then: “Hickel got shouted down not by Gen Z but by members of an older generation that now criticizes young people for failing to respect free speech. Princeton students allowed every speaker in the next half century to have their say.” Unfortunately, this may have jinxed Princeton, as, apparently after Eisgruber’s manuscript was finalized, two speaking events at Princeton were disrupted.

    Survey critiques suggest he didn’t read our survey

    Eisgruber next tries to argue that concerns about self-censorship are overblown. He starts reasonably enough, noting that survey data can be tricky: 

    Polling data is, however, notoriously sensitive to sampling biases and small differences in the formulation of questions. Data about concepts such as free speech requires careful interpretation that it rarely gets.

    We agree! But then he cites FIRE’s 2021 finding that over 80% of college students self-censor at least sometimes, and 21% do so often, only to dismiss it: “Should we worry about these numbers? Not without more evidence and better poll questions.”

    What’s wrong with the poll question? He never says. He just moves on to talk about other surveys. So let’s stay on this one. What does he think about self-censorship? Well, as he defines it, he actually thinks it’s good:

    Indeed, I am most concerned about the substantial fraction of people who say they never self-censor. Do they really say everything that pops into their heads? . . . Of course people self-censor! Politeness, tact, and civility require it. And as we become more aware of the sensibilities of the diverse people around us, we may realize that we need to self-censor more often or differently than we did before.

    Do students share his conception of self-censorship as politeness or conscientious refusal to offend? Here’s how we have asked that question for the past four years:

    This next series of questions asks you about self-censorship in different settings. For the purpose of these questions, self-censorship is defined as follows: Refraining from sharing certain views because you fear social (exclusion from social events), professional (losing job or promotion), legal (prosecution or fine), or violent (assault) consequences, whether in person or remotely (by phone or online), and whether the consequences come from state or non-state sources.

    Q: How often do you self-censor during conversations with other students on campus?

    Q: How often do you self-censor during conversations with your professors?

    Q: How often do you self-censor during classroom discussions?

    • Never

    • Rarely
    • Occasionally, once or twice a month
    • Fairly often, a couple times a week
    • Very often, nearly every day

    As you can see, this isn’t asking about garden-variety tact or politeness. To be fair to Eisgruber, we didn’t provide this definition when we asked the question in 2021 (though he should have sought the most recent data; that he did not is itself strange). Unfortunately for him, since adding this clarifying definition, the portion of students who self-censor at least rarely has increased to 91-93%, depending on the context, and those reporting that they often self-censor now stand at 24-28%.

    In other words, a quarter of university students in America regularly silence themselves out of fear of social, professional, legal, or violent consequences. As for his request for “more evidence,” the responses are dire year after year. Maybe Eisgruber still thinks that’s fine, but we don’t. 

    Support for violence and shoutdowns is worse than he admits

    Eisgruber also downplays how many students think it’s acceptable to use violence or shoutdowns to silence speakers, and tries to hand-wave away data in an explanation that utterly mangles First Amendment law:

    One explanation highlights ambiguities in the survey questions. For example, American free speech law agrees with students who say that it is “rarely” or “sometimes” acceptable to stop people from talking. Not all speech is protected. If, for example, speakers are about to shout “fire” falsely in a crowded theater, or if they are preparing to incite imminent violence, you may and should do what you can to (in the words of the poll question) “prevent them from talking.”

    We would be remiss to pass up an opportunity to once again address the immortal, zombie claim that you can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater. Eisgruber did better than many others by including “falsely,” but it’s still incomplete and misleading (did a panic occur? Was it likely or intended? These questions matter) and has been for a very long time. It’s dispiriting to see it come from the president of an Ivy League university — one who has a law degree, no less. But also, the fact that you as a listener think someone might be about to engage in unprotected speech doesn’t mean you should dole out vigilante justice to prevent it. If you do, you’ll probably go to jail.

    Different wording, same story: growing student support for violence and shoutdowns shows campus free speech is in danger.

    But leaving that aside, what of his contention that the high levels of support are just an artifact of the “prevent them from talking” wording? Well, here’s the wording of our latest poll question on that subject:

    How acceptable would you say it is for students to engage in the following actions to protest a campus speaker?

    Q: Shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus.

    Q: Blocking other students from attending a campus speech.

    Q: Using violence to stop a campus speech.

    • Always acceptable
    • Sometimes acceptable
    • Rarely acceptable
    • Never acceptable

    With this different wording, we find 71% at least “rarely” accept shoutdowns, 54% at least “rarely” support blocking, and 34% at least “rarely” support violence. Different wording, same story: growing student support for violence and shoutdowns shows campus free speech is in danger. 

    It’s important to note that Eisgruber offers only quibbles with question wording, and offers theories for how students may be interpreting questions. He doesn’t offer competing data. While that might be understandable for the typical social media critic, if all this could be debunked by “better poll questions,” no one is in a better position to commission said research (at least on his or her campus) than the president of a university. Instead of offering unconvincing dismissals of existing data, he could have contributed to the body of knowledge with his “better” questions. We still encourage him to do so. Seriously. Please run a free speech survey at Princeton.

    As much as FIRE or Eisgruber may wish these poll numbers were different, we need to deal with the world as it is.

    Refuting FIRE data with . . . data that agree with FIRE’s data

    So what data does Eisgruber use to support his case that the situation on campus is rosier than FIRE’s data suggests? As mentioned earlier, he turns to a study of the UNC system called “Free Expression and Constructive Dialogue in the University of North Carolina.” We were darkly amused by this because FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens, who heads up our College Free Speech Rankings survey, was approached by that study’s authors based on his work on surveys for FIRE and Heterodox Academy — and they consulted with Stevens about what questions to include in their survey. Here’s Eisgruber:

    I believe, however, that the analysis by Ryan, Engelhardt, Larson, and McNeilly accurately describes most colleges and universities. Certainly it chimes with my own experiences at Princeton. 

    This could be in a textbook next to “confirmation bias.” The data that jibes with his experience he sees as more trustworthy. Yet this survey does not refute FIRE’s findings, but is perfectly compatible with them. The rosy finding upon which Eisgruber puts a lot of weight is their finding that faculty do not push political agendas in class. This isn’t an area that FIRE studies, so it’s not a refutation of our work. More importantly, it’s not asking the same question.

    Eisgruber goes on:

    There is another reason why the North Carolina study’s conclusions are plausible. They mesh with and reflect broader, well-documented trends in American political life. A mountain of evidence shows that over the past several decades, and especially in the twenty-first century, political identities have hardened.

    But FIRE’s data is also perfectly compatible with the idea of increasing polarization. It’s hard, therefore, even to find the disagreement to which he’s pointing when he says their data is good and our data is bad.

    The UNC survey, like ours, found “campuses do not consistently achieve an atmosphere that promotes free expression” and “students who identify as conservative face distinctive challenges.” This is fully compatible with our data. It’s not clear where Eisgruber finds meaningful disagreement, and to the extent he frames this data as hopeful, it seems to misinterpret the authors’ findings.

    Even if the data coming out of UNC schools were wildly different from our national-level data, it would be a mistake to take it as representative of the nation as a whole. The mistake, specifically, would be cherry-picking. Six of the seven UNC schools that we rank are in the top 20 of our College Free Speech Rankings. The most amusing part, from a FIRE perspective, is that this is not a coincidence. Those six each worked with FIRE’s policy reform team and achieved our highest “green light” rating for free speech, and have implemented programming to support free expression on campus. Indeed, since the early days of FIRE’s speech code ratings, FIRE has made a special effort to evaluate the speech codes of all of the UNC System schools, even the smaller ones, thanks to a partnership with the state’s James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (then called the Pope Center). So if UNC campuses are far more likely to have a “green light” than the rest of the nation, that’s in significant part because of FIRE’s ongoing work. Princeton, in comparison, receives FIRE’s lowest “red light” rating.

    If anything, the UNC schools provide evidence that the way to improve free speech on campus is to address it head-on, rather than grasp about for some explanation to justify the current state of affairs. Speaking of which:

    Don’t be like Eisgruber — real leaders listen

    In the process of writing this piece, we received word of a very different response to FIRE data from administrators at Wellesley College:

    “Both FIRE stats and our own research, in some ways, have been similar,” said [Wellesley Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs Tara] Murphy. “We are taking this seriously.”

    In November [2024], Wellesley commissioned Grand River Solutions to conduct a survey on civil discourse among students. Out of 2,281 students invited to participate, 668 responded to at least one of the three questions, yielding a 29% response rate. The data was similar to the FIRE report: 36.8% of respondents said they felt either “very reluctant or somewhat reluctant” to share their views on controversial topics in the classroom, and 30% felt similarly hesitant outside of class. 

    That’s the kind of response we hope for. If campuses aren’t sure that FIRE has it right, they should be getting their own data so that they can address any campus free speech problems that the data may bear out.  

    We’re happy to report that in that sense FIRE’s rankings have been extremely successful. Many schools have reached out and worked with us to improve their policies and begin to implement programming to support free speech on campus. As dire as some of the stats can appear to be, FIRE has seen green shoots in the form of faculty and administrators who recognize the problem and want to do something about it.

    Our research deserves, and has, more thoughtful critics. Princeton’s community deserves a president who is more curious about what’s happening on his campus, and serious about improving the environment for free speech. Maybe it’s a coincidence that the academic experience that ultimately led Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate to found FIRE began when they met during their freshman year at … Princeton University. Or maybe it’s not. 

    If finding out ever becomes a priority for Eisgruber, we’d be happy to help.

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  • Ten arguments against free speech

    Ten arguments against free speech

    We tackle ten common arguments against free speech.
    FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff and FIRE Senior Fellow and
    former ACLU President Nadine Strossen are the co-authors of the new
    book, “War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech–And Why They
    Fail.”

    Timestamps:

    00:00 Intro

    01:18 Book’s origins

    04:25 Argument #1: Words are violence

    20:27 Argument #2: Words are dangerous

    25:09 Argument #3: Hate speech isn’t free speech

    31:06 Argument #4: About shoutdowns

    37:18 Argument #5: Free speech is outdated

    45:41 Argument #6 Free speech is right-wing

    50:14 Argument #7: About that crowded theater and
    marketplace of ideas

    59:27 Argument #9: Misinformation and
    disinformation

    01:03:53 Argument #8: Free speech protects power

    01:09:30 Argument #10: About the Holocaust and Rwandan
    genocide

    01:13:35 Outro

    Get the Book:Purchase
    War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech–And Why They
    Fail.

    Enjoy listening to the podcast? Donate to FIRE today
    (https://www.thefire.org/) and
    get exclusive content like member webinars, special episodes, and
    more. If you became a FIRE Member
    through a donation to FIRE at thefire.org and would like access to
    Substack’s
    paid subscriber podcast feed, please email [email protected].

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  • The global free speech recession

    The global free speech recession

    This essay was originally published in The Dispatch on Oct. 28, 2025.

    Since Charlie Kirk’s murder, the Trump administration has launched a blitzkrieg against Americans’ free speech rights. The scale and speed are dizzying — and they jeopardize the United States’ credibility as the world’s leading defender of free expression as other democracies continue to falter.

    The administration’s most alarming actions blur the distinction between protected and unprotected speech as well as words and violence. Right after the Kirk tragedy, Attorney General Pam Bondi said: “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” Bondi later walked this statement back, saying that “Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment.” But since then, the administration has only continued to conflate protected speech with violence.

    Why everything Pam Bondi said about ‘hate speech’ is wrong

    The nation’s top law enforcement officer doesn’t understand there is no hate-speech exception to the First Amendment — and that’s scary.


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    On Sept. 25, the White House released a national security memo on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” Inside it lies this passage:

    Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

    There’s little subtlety here. The White House has flagged Americans it considers anti-American, anti-capitalist, or anti-Christian — none of which the memo defines — as potential national security threats. The president’s memo asserts a vast left-wing conspiracy to incite political violence and then directs the National Joint Terrorism Task Force and its local offices to “investigate all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies.”

    This guilt-by-association tactic is absolutely chilling in a free society. Being critical of America, capitalism, and Christianity shouldn’t put you on the feds’ radar because all those viewpoints are protected speech. A federal investigation should only occur when there’s reasonable evidence that some person or group — regardless of their constitutionally protected beliefs and opinions — has crossed the line into criminality. By the memo’s logic, the president’s own Make America Great Again movement could have been investigated after the political violence that erupted on Jan. 6. The message conveyed here is simple: Watch what you say. Or else.

    And if you’re a noncitizen legally in the country, that message goes doubly for you. Two weeks ago, the State Department revoked six foreigners’ visas for their social media posts about Kirk’s murder. According to the State Department on X, it will “continue to identify visa holders who celebrated the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk.” This continues the administration’s crusade against noncitizens who engage in expression that the government doesn’t like. But the First Amendment protects the free speech rights of anyone on American soil, as the Supreme Court made clear in 1945’s Bridges v. Wixon. (Full disclosure: the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, my employer, is currently suing Secretary of State Marco Rubio to challenge two federal provisions that give the secretary the power to deport noncitizens for their protected speech.)

    Why FIRE is suing Secretary of State Rubio — and what our critics get wrong about noncitizens’ rights

    FIRE is suing Secretary of State Rubio to defend the First Amendment rights of legal immigrants threatened with deportation simply for speaking their minds.


    Read More

    The administration has intensified its prolific jawboning, too, turning the screws on the private sector, particularly the media, to achieve what it does not have the constitutional power to do itself. The most infamous example of this occurred when Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr pressured Disney and ABC to cancel Jimmy Kimmel Live. Soon after, ABC indefinitely suspended Kimmel, though he was back on air after a week. Then in mid-October, Bondi leaned on Facebook to remove a group page that allowed users to track where ICE agents were in Chicago, much like Waze alerts you to speed traps. Like it or not, this is constitutionally protected speech. Telling folks the location of law enforcement isn’t a crime, and the creators and users of the page are registering their dissent to the government’s immigration policies.

    During the Biden administration, President Trump and conservative Americans understood the perniciousness of jawboning. They rightly pointed to the behind-the-scenes pressure the Biden administration exerted on social media companies to suppress stories they deemed as mis- or disinformation. This included Hunter Biden’s laptop, the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, or the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origins. Yet now that Trump is back in power, the feeling is that “the left” is getting their just deserts. Politics is triumphing over principle — remember Trump’s promise to “bring back” free speech and his executive order restoring free speech and ending federal censorship once and for all — as America’s culture of free expression deteriorates more and more.

    But the Trump administration’s deliberate and focused attacks on free expression don’t just impact America, they reverberate globally. Across the democratic world, a free speech recession continues to worsen. Rather than defend this foundational human right at home and abroad, the U.S. government is abdicating that responsibility and undermining the legitimacy of free speech in an increasingly illiberal and authoritarian world.

    Two years ago, The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank at Vanderbilt University, released a report, “The Free Speech Recession Hits Home.” The report analyzed free speech developments in 22 democracies between 2015 and 2022. It found something alarming: “Over 75 percent of the developments discussed are speech restrictive.”

    Recent examples from the United States’ closest allies are illustrative of these societies’ splintering belief in free speech as a critical right in a democracy.

    This fall, Canada’s Quebec province will consider a bill to ban prayer in public. Secularism Minister Jean-François Roberge said the bill would be introduced as part of his mandate “to strengthen secularism.” Religious expression, of course, is a form of free expression, but Roberge believes it shouldn’t be public. “Seeing people praying in the streets, in public parks, is not something we want in Quebec,” he said. He added: “When we want to pray, we go to a church, we go to a mosque, but not in public places. And, yes, we will look at the means where we can act legally or otherwise.”

    In Germany last year, a 64-year-old man had his flat searched and tablet seized because of alleged “antisemitic” posts as well as one calling a German politician a “professional idiot.” Under German law, it’s not only a crime to insult a politician, the penalties are more severe than criticizing a German pleb, in perfect Animal Farm style. Also in 2024, American expat C.J. Hopkins was charged with disseminating propaganda for criticizing Germany’s COVID-19 response on X by superimposing a barely visible white swastika on top of a white medical mask.

    So to Speak Podcast Transcript: CJ Hopkins compared modern Germany to Nazi Germany. Now he’s standing trial.

    J Hopkins is an American playwright, novelist, and political satirist. He moved to Germany in 2004.


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    This is a feature, not a bug, of Germany’s repressive speech climate. During a 60 Minutes story from last February, when correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi asked three prosecutors if it was a crime in Germany to insult someone, they confirmed it was. The punishment could even be worse when posted online “because in internet, it stays there,” said one prosecutor. Germany’s federal police, the BKA, also organize “action days” — including investigations, raids, interrogations, and seizures — to crack down on hate speech and insulting politicians online. In June, the BKA launched its 12th day of action, which included a total of 180 “police measures.” Herbert Reul, an interior minister for the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, summed it up best, telling a German news agency, “Digital arsonists must not be allowed to hide behind their phones or computers.”

    In France, President Emmanuel Macron took thin-skinned to extraordinary heights when he sued a billboard owner in 2021 for using some of his inventory to depict the French president dressed up like Adolf Hitler to protest France’s pandemic policies. The business owner, Michel-Ange Flori, told Reuters: “I caricature. People may or may not like it but it is all the same, caricature will remain caricature.” A French court disagreed, slapping Flori with a fine of 10,000 euros. In response, Flori’s lawyer said “the right to caricature has been violated” in France, adding, “The president, so quick to defend freedom of expression … considers that it stops at his own august person.”

    But the most depressing accomplice in the West’s retreat from free speech is, without a doubt, our neighbor across the pond. In April, the Times of London reported a shocking statistic. Analyzing custody data, the newspaper reported that police in the United Kingdom arrested more than 24,000 people from 2022 through 2023 for sending “grossly offensive” messages or sharing posts considered “indecent,” “obscene,” or of a “menacing character” on social media.

    The most recent and infamous case of this is Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan. In early September, five armed police officers arrested the writer after he disembarked a flight from the United States to Heathrow. Linehan’s offense: mean tweets about transgender people, which the Metropolitan Police said incited violence. Linehan posted the tweets in April — four and a half months before his arrest — demonstrating the absurdity of the inciting-violence rationale. Last week, both Linehan and Londoners received good news: The Metropolitan Police announced they dropped the investigation into Linehan and said it would no longer investigate “non-crime hate incidents.” That’s the right approach, of course, but that’s only one police force across the entire kingdom. It also doesn’t undo the ordeal Linehan went through, which is why he intends to sue the Metropolitan police for wrongful arrest.

    The U.K.’s crackdown on speech, however, isn’t contained to online discourse. Since July, more than 2,000 people have been arrested for expressing support for Palestine Action, a pro-Palestinian direct action network. In July, Parliament deemed the group a terrorist organization and banned it after two members broke into a military base and damaged two planes.

    In early September, London’s Metropolitan Police arrested nearly 900 protesters for peacefully protesting the ban. A month later, police arrested nearly 500 more people for demonstrating in support of Palestine Action in Trafalgar Square. The reason for their arrest is eye-widening: They held up a sign that read, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” Police even took in a man who held up a magazine cover about these arrests.

    Diane Afhim, a 69-year-old protester, said it best during the September arrests: “I feel that justice is not working if people are being arrested for holding a sign. This is not my Britain.”

    Late last month, another disconcerting story came out of the U.K., when a judge handed down a suspended sentence to Moussa Kadri, sparing him jail. Back in February, Kadri attacked a protester, Hamit Coskun, with a knife for burning the Quran outside of the Turkish consulate in London.

    “The court is effectively saying that if you attack a blasphemer with a knife, … you won’t have to spend a day behind bars,” said Lord Young of Acton, general secretary of the Free Speech Union, in reaction to Kadri’s suspended sentence.

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    But things get worse. Back in June, a court found Coskun, the victim of Kadri’s knife attack, guilty of a religiously aggravated public order offense and ordered him to pay a fine. “Your actions in burning the Quran where you did were highly provocative,” the judge said, “and your actions were accompanied by bad language in some cases directed toward the religion and were motivated at least in part by hatred of followers of the religion.” Most alarming was the judge’s finding that the violent attack on Coskun was evidence of Coskun’s guilt. You read that right.

    Fortunately, Coskun won his appeal this month. On Oct. 10, Coskun’s conviction was overturned by a judge who reminded Britons that they have no blasphemy law on the books.

    “Burning a Koran may be an act that many Muslims find desperately upsetting and offensive,” Justice Joel Bennathan said. “The criminal law, however, is not a mechanism that seeks to avoid people being upset, even grievously upset. The right to freedom of expression, if it is a right worth having, must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb.”

    While the courts finally got it right, Coskun never should have had to go through this nightmare in the first place.

    The despots of the world must relish the propaganda value of this Western backsliding on free expression.

    If they attack the press, they can point to what Trump is doing in the United States as justification. Throw a critic in jail? They can bring up Macron’s lawsuit for caricaturing him in France. Punish a religious dissenter? Well, there’s the curious case of Hamit Coskun in London. Repress the supporters of a disfavored group? They can point to the UK arrests of Palestine Action protesters. These illiberal actions are gifts to the world’s dictators — the Putins, the Erdogans, the Xis of the world — demonstrating that when push comes to shove, the world’s democracies will crack down on speech they don’t like, too.

    Just look at the unjust trial of media mogul Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong, where a judge in the case cited censorship in the U.S. and UK to justify the proceedings against Lai. “People who were freely expressing their views on Palestine, they were arrested in England … [and] in the U.S.,” Judge Esther Toh said in August. “It’s easy to say ‘la-di-da, it’s not illegal,’ but it’s not an absolute. Each country’s government has a different limit on freedom of expression.”

    But it doesn’t need to be this way.

    It’s a cruel irony that America’s dedication to free speech is slipping as we prepare to celebrate this nation’s 250th birthday. But it’s an opportunity, too. An opportunity to recommit to what makes the American experiment so special: our ability to settle our differences through dialogue and the ballot box, rather than dehumanization and the bullet. America is still the last best hope of earth, that shining city upon the hill, if we’ll fight for it.

    Even as America’s culture of free speech withers, the First Amendment fortunately still gives this country the world’s strongest constitutional protection for speech. But culture matters. Woe to us if we indulge our worst impulses and welcome in the ravenous, all-consuming spirits of censorship and violence and turn our back on what truly makes America exceptional.

    As Judge Learned Hand wrote back in 1944: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

    There would be no greater tragedy than if free speech dies here by our own hands, to the delight of despots everywhere.

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  • FIRE SURVEY: Colleagues and faculty unions fail to defend scholars targeted for speech

    FIRE SURVEY: Colleagues and faculty unions fail to defend scholars targeted for speech

    “I was afraid to leave my home for several weeks. I was afraid for the safety of my children. I received death threats.”

    “I was vomiting throughout the day, couldn’t eat, was having constant panic attacks, couldn’t be around people or leave the house . . .”

    “I was getting violent threats via email every day . . . The police were doing daily drive-bys because so many people threatened me with violence.”

    PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 28, 2025 — These are just some of the harrowing first-person accounts collected by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in “Sanctioned Scholars: The Price of Speaking Freely in Today’s Academy,” a new survey of scholars who have been targeted for any protected speech since the beginning of the decade.

    “Cancellation campaigns are often wrapped in the language of preventing ‘emotional harm,’” said FIRE’s Manager of Polling and Analytics Nathan Honeycutt. “But our survey shows that it’s the mobs themselves that inflict lasting mental anguish on academics, many of whom still suffer the consequences long after the controversy subsided.”

    FIRE reached out to the over 600 academics listed in its Scholars Under Fire database who were sanctioned or targeted between 2020 and 2024, of whom 209 completed our survey. (FIRE’s survey was conducted before the Sept. 10 assassination of Charlie Kirk, which was followed by nearly a hundred scholars being targeted, over a dozen fired, and 2025 emerging as a new record high.)

    Nearly all (94%) who participated in the survey described the impact of their experience as negative. Roughly two-thirds (65%) experienced emotional distress, and significant chunks reported facing harrowing social setbacks, such as being shunned at work (40%) or lost professional relationships (47%) and friendships (33%).

    For some, the consequences were severe. About a quarter of the scholars who completed the survey reported that they sought psychological counseling (27%), and 1 in 5 lost their jobs entirely (20%).

    Nearly all institutions of higher learning promise academic freedom and free speech rights to their scholars. But many of the targeted scholars reported that they received no support from precisely the institutions and individuals who were supposed to have their backs in moments of crisis and controversy. Only 21% reported that they received at least a moderate amount of  public support of their faculty union, for example, and a paltry 11% reported that they received public support from administrators.

    Tellingly, colleagues felt more comfortable supporting the targeted scholars privately rather than publicly. Just under half of scholars received at least a moderate amount of private support from colleagues (49%), but only about a third (34%) received their support publicly.

    Grouped column chart

    In their open-ended responses to FIRE’s survey, many scholars reported that this was their deepest wound: the public silence and abandonment by their peers. “My biggest disappointment was in the cowardice of other faculty who refused to do anything public on my behalf,” one professor wrote.

    “Free speech advocates have long argued that acts of censorship don’t just silence one person,” said Honeycutt. “They chill the speech of anyone who agrees with them, and even those who disagree but are too cowed to defend their right to speak. Our report shows that the academy urgently needs courageous faculty willing to stand up for their colleagues, even when doing so is difficult or unpopular.”

    FIRE’s report also found a noticeable partisan gap in the level of public support reported by scholars. Larger proportions of conservative than liberal faculty reported that they received support from the general public (55% vs. 37%). But far fewer than their liberal peers reported that they received public support from their faculty union (7% vs. 29%) or their university colleagues (19% vs. 40%).

    Grouped column chart

    “Support for academic freedom should never depend on the views being expressed, but our survey shows that’s exactly what’s happening,” said FIRE Research Advisor Sean Stevens. “If faculty unions and institutions of higher learning won’t stand by scholars in their moments of crisis, they can’t claim to stand for free speech and inquiry.”

    The Scholars Under Fire survey was fielded from Jan. 15 to April 15, 2025. A total of 635 scholars were invited to participate in this study, and 209 participated. The scholars recruited were individuals listed in FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire Database because they experienced a sanction or sanction attempt between 2020 and 2024. Participation in the survey was anonymous to encourage candid responses without fear of personal consequence, and to allow participants to speak more freely about their experiences.

    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 recognizes that colleges and universities play a vital role in preserving free thought within a free society. To this end, we place a special emphasis on defending the individual rights of students and faculty members on our nation’s campuses, including freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience.

    CONTACT:

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

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  • Clear and Present Danger – A history of free speech

    Clear and Present Danger – A history of free speech

    Why have kings, emperors, and governments killed and imprisoned people to shut them up? And why have countless people risked death and imprisonment to express their beliefs? Jacob Mchangama guides you through the history of free speech from the trial of Socrates to the Great Firewall.
    Stay up to date with Clear and Present Danger on the show’s website at freespeechhistory.com

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  • How ‘anti-woke’ laws and cancel culture combine to chill classroom speech

    How ‘anti-woke’ laws and cancel culture combine to chill classroom speech

    Over the past several years, some politicians have tried to ban or limit discussion of controversial ideas in higher education, particularly those related to critical race theory, gender identity, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

    FIRE has been on the front lines of this fight, opposing bills that target classroom speech and challenging those that become law. We’ve warned legislators that attempts to ban ideas from the college classroom are unconstitutional. As the Supreme Court explained, the First Amendment “does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.”

    Many legislatures now write their bills to avoid crossing this constitutional line. When they do not, courts often step in. Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act,” for example — part of which FIRE has challenged in court — currently faces a preliminary injunction blocking the enforcement of its classroom provisions.

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    Perhaps in part because of this roadblock, some actors have taken a more indirect approach to removing disfavored ideas from the classroom: a mix of “anti-woke” laws and cancel culture designed to intimidate schools into doing what the state cannot do directly.

    This process involves some or all of the following steps: a politician passes an “anti-woke” law, someone misinterprets the law and claims a professor violated it, outrage erupts and people demand the school take action, school administrators cave to the pressure and punish the teacher, the school announces reviews of curricula, and then other schools follow suit.

    Here’s how that cycle works in detail — and why it’s chilling classroom speech.

    Step 1: “Anti-woke” laws set the stage

    Texas A&M senior lecturer Melissa McCoul began the summer semester teaching ENGL 360: Literature for Children, a course she had taught 12 times that focused on “representative writers, genres, texts and movements.” During the third week of class, they were reading Jude Saves the World, a novel about a 12-year-old who identifies as nonbinary. As part of their discussion, McCoul displayed an image of the “gender unicorn,” a graphic device used to educate children about gender identity, expression, and sexuality. 

    Whatever one’s personal views, it should not be a surprise that a children’s literature course would focus on how contemporary children’s authors approach the major social issues of the day, such as gender ideology. Faculty at public colleges also have a First Amendment right to share their views, and to invite students who disagree to challenge them. In fact, McCoul acknowledged in the course syllabus that some of the class materials would spark “differing opinions” and that students were “not required to agree.”

    This was a chance for open dialogue, until it wasn’t.

    A student in McCoul’s class raised her hand and asserted that President Trump’s executive order on gender identity somehow made the discussion illegal. The student subsequently reached out to school President Mark Welsh, who defended the inclusion of LGBT content in professional-track courses. He explained to her that students “want to understand the issues” that affect the people they will work with.

    Nevertheless, the school canceled the class for the summer, citing “the emotions” generated by this controversy. That’s no reason to cancel a class, but the school did not punish McCoul or cancel her class for the fall semester. Instead, they agreed that her course would be taken out of the core curriculum and more clearly marked as a special topics class.

    But then, on Sept. 8, Texas State Representative Brian Harrison posted video of the student’s exchange with McCoul on X and wrote a letter to the Trump administration calling for an “investigation into discriminatory DEI practices.” The assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Harmeet K. Dhillon, called the incident “deeply concerning” and said her division would “look into this.” Gov. Greg Abbott said McCoul acted “contrary to Texas law” without actually citing any specific laws (though Abbott directed state agencies earlier this year to align their practices and policies to recognize only two sexes).

    Crucially, neither Abbott’s directive nor Trump’s order bans discussion of gender identity in college classrooms. Doing so, after all, would be unconstitutional. Instead, they largely instruct Texas and federal agencies to recognize only two sexes in official government work, not to police classroom speech.

    Step 2: An outrage campaign demands punishment

    Harrison’s Sept. 8 post kicked off a cascade of calls to discipline McCoul. It was also only the first in a long thread of posts that set off a social media firestorm. Before long, other high profile government figures like Abbott and Dhillon were chiming in. Others with large social media followings picked up the story. A routine classroom discussion had been reframed to the public as a legal violation requiring immediate sanction.

    Step 3: The school caves to pressure

    Soon after, Texas A&M fired McCoul. The school also demoted College of Arts and Sciences’ Dean Mark Zoran and the English Department head Emily Johansen. 

    President Welsh justified these moves by alleging McCoul taught “content that was inconsistent with the published course description.” The apparent basis for this assertion was that McCoul’s course was renumbered as ENGL 394, rather than a 400-level number that would supposedly mark it as a special-topics class. But McCoul and Johansen dispute this, noting that 394 places the course outside the core curriculum and qualifies it as a special-topic class. Other faculty agreed that there is little difference between these designations. 

    Whatever the case, the public pressure only continued to build. Harrison demanded that Texas A&M terminate Welsh. Texas’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, echoed the call, saying that Welsh’s “ambivalence on the issue and his dismissal of the student’s concerns by immediately taking the side of the professor is unacceptable.” Barely a week later, Welsh announced his resignation, following McCoul out the door.

    Step 4: Administrators announce curricular reviews

    If this story ended only with a professor being fired for her protected speech, that would be bad enough. And driving out a university president is even more alarming, because it shows how these campaigns scare people into silence or submission. But Texas A&M System Chancellor Glenn Hegar then announced that he and the board of regents would audit all courses across all 12 schools in the A&M System. 

    Neither Hegar nor the board explained how it would carry out the course review, leaving faculty members guessing as to what materials would be under their microscope. But in a campaign like this one, a chilling vagueness is part of the point. In the aftermath of seeing a fellow professor fired for her classroom speech, one has to imagine that many will choose to avoid addressing sensitive topics in the future. And this will only serve to rob Texas A&M students of the opportunity to engage with challenging and topical issues.

    Step 5: Other schools get the message

    Although this controversy started with one class taught by one professor at one Texas A&M campus, the ripple effects rapidly reached campuses across the state. According to reporting at the time, multiple school systems launched reviews:

    • Texas Tech told faculty that teaching must comply with “current state and federal law recogniz[ing] only two human sexes.”
    • The University of North Texas system ordered an expedited review of courses and programs, including syllabi, for compliance with “all current applicable state and federal laws, executive orders, and court orders.”
    • A University of Texas system spokesperson said they were reviewing “gender identity” courses for legal compliance.
    • The Texas State University System told each campus to review academic programming “in light of recent inquiries.”
    • Texas Woman’s University System said it was reviewing academic courses and programs for compliance.

    And that, in a nutshell, is how vague laws and online outrage came together in a toxic cocktail that resulted in a fired professor, a removed dean and department head, and a university president’s resignation, not to mention several systemwide university audits of entire course catalogues — all starting with a single student’s complaint that discussing a children’s book was “illegal.”

    A growing problem

    This practice of overreading laws and executive orders in order to target protected speech is, unfortunately, not just limited to Texas. In July, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Oversight Project reportedly filed a records request for syllabi and materials from roughly 70 courses containing terms such as: “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging,” “gender identity,” “intersectionality,” “white privilege,” “cultural humility,” “racial equity,” “implicit bias,” “microaggressions,” “queer,” and “sexuality.” 

    The stated purpose of this request is to evaluate and publicize “compliance with current Executive Orders issued by the President of the United States.” But again, Trump’s executive orders have no bearing on whether these words can be used in class materials. Suggesting otherwise and going on a fishing expedition for controversial class materials only further chills protected speech.

    Sometimes the pressure is quieter, but no less chilling. At the University of Alabama, Dana Patton, director of the Witt Fellows Program, says she was told by university officials that a “very powerful person” in the state capital believed her program violated state law. This person reportedly asserted, among other things, that “divisive concepts (were) embedded” in the program. Patton responded by removing course content, including three documentaries, from one of her classes because they can prompt a “visceral reaction” and “feelings of guilt and anger” in students. This is self-censorship driven by fear of political blowback, not educational judgment.

    How not to reform higher ed

    As government officials increasingly look for ways to reform higher education, they must remember that efforts to ban controversial ideas from academia are not merely unconstitutional, they’re harmful regardless of their legal legitimacy. Such efforts frustrate an essential purpose of university life: young Americans should be able to explore and grapple with a wide variety of ideas, even those that many find offensive.

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    The debates in this country around gender and sexuality will not subside because of censorship in Texas. Indeed, classroom debates on this topic have the potential to leave both conservative and liberal students with a richer understanding of the issue. But some young Texans will now be robbed of this opportunity. Many others will be left with impoverished versions of those conversations, stripped of anything controversial that would draw the ire of government officials.

    We should expect college students to be fearless when faced with ideas they dislike, regardless of the partisan valence of those ideas. As FIRE said when critics on the left came after conservative University of Pennsylvania professor Amy Wax, “Any university that would attempt to shield its community from offense would soon see the death of intellectual vitality, and the waning of its influence in society.”

    If lawmakers want to reform higher education or bolster viewpoint diversity, they should do so by passing laws that protect the speech rights of all students and faculty — like FIRE’s model legislation — and they should focus on bringing more ideas onto public campuses, not removing those they dislike through vague assertions of illegality and targeted pressure campaigns.

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