FIRE staff also take your questions on Charlie Kirk’s
assassination, President Trump’s lawsuit against The New York
Times, cancel culture, and more. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:42
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s comments that “hate speech” is
distinct…
Nearly two years ago, the Hamas-led October 7 attacks on Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza sparked intense debate and demonstrations on American campuses.
Many schools responded by attempting to censor controversial but protected speech in the name of combating antisemitism. But in testimony before Congress on Dec. 5, 2023, University of Pennsylvania’s then-President Liz Magill initially declined to follow suit. She explained that “calling for genocide” does not always violate Penn’s rules. Instead, she correctly labeled this a “context-dependent decision,” recognizing that rhetoric some find deeply offensive can still be protected speech. This assertion was in line with Penn’s longstanding — but often ignored — commitment to tracking the First Amendment in its own policies.
Unfortunately, Magill quickly backtracked in the face of public criticism, including from Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. The governor said publicly that Magill needed to “give a one-word answer” and that her testimony demonstrated a “failure of leadership.”
As it turns out, the governor’s response was not limited to his public comments. Recent reporting by The Chronicle of Higher Education reveals how Gov. Shapiro’s office enmeshed itself in this controversy and in Penn’s response to antisemitism on campus in the months and semester that followed October 7.
Seizing on a rarely used provision of the Penn Statutes of the Trustees that establishes the governor as a trustee ex officio, Gov. Shapiro appointed Philadelphia lawyer Robb Fox as his observer to the board of trustees. Gov. Shapiro’s director of external affairs Amanda Warren explained in a then-private email that Fox would be “integrated into all future board meetings, as well as ongoing antisemitism work, on behalf of the Governor.” Fox was previously part of the governor’s transition team in 2022 and serves as his appointee on the board of SEPTA, Philadelphia’s transit authority.
Per the Chronicle, Fox “quickly immersed himself in Penn’s affairs — arguing technicalities of the board of trustee’s rules, liaising with students, faculty, and administrators, and contributing to Penn’s task force on antisemitism.” He began corresponding with Marc Rowan, who serves as chair of the Penn Wharton School’s board of advisors and was an early critic of both Magill and Bok. And in one early email regarding a proposed statement from the board, Fox said he would tell them “enough with the statements” and that they needed “a vote on board chair [Scott Bok] and president remaining.”
Days later, Magill and Bok resigned. A member of Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences’ board later thanked Fox for this early engagement, saying the trustees were able to oust Magill and Bok “with the governor’s nudge and with his support.”
All of this broke with precedent. Historically, Penn did not allow designees to attend board meetings in the governor’s place. The university only broke with this tradition after “many conversations between the Governor, President Magill, Board leadership, and staff.”
Fox’s influence reportedly expanded in the months that followed. Penn’s then-interim President Larry Jameson intervened to add Fox to the university’s antisemitism task force. One member of the task force told the Chronicle that Fox frequently said he was trying to represent the governor’s position. And when Fox got the impression that the task force was trying to treat him as a mere spectator, he reached out to Warren and declared that he would “not be an observer.”
Throughout all this, Fox and Warren frequently acted as a team. She connected him with Rowan in the early days of his appointment, and later connected him with the Penn Israel Public Affairs Committee. Fox and Warren were both part of an email exchange with Penn’s new board chair that sought information about the burgeoning encampment. And when Fox considered bypassing the task force on antisemitism and going directly to President Jameson to address an Instagram post by a pro-Palestine student organization, he first emailed Warren to discuss the issue with her.
Neither Penn nor Gov. Shapiro’s office deny any of this involvement. Indeed, both parties acknowledged their relationship in comments to the Chronicle, with Gov. Shapiro’s spokesperson explaining that they and Fox intervened in order to combat hate and antisemitism.
Combating unlawful antisemitic harassment is a noble goal, but when powerful public officials wield their influence to regulate speech at private universities, they’re playing a dangerous game. We saw this play out recently at Columbia University, where university leaders responded to the Trump administration’s unlawful funding freeze (purportedly a response to campus antisemitism) by capitulating to demands that will chill protected speech.
Columbia incorporated the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s overbroad definition of antisemitism, which the Trump administration had earlier demanded, into its own definition. Later, in a settlement agreement it signed to restore government funding, Columbia required students to commit to vague goals like “equality and respect” that leave far too much room for abuse, much like the DEI statements, civility oaths, and other types of compelled speech FIRE has long opposed.
Gov. Shapiro’s intervention here is not nearly as heavy-handed, but it is still cause for concern. If the Chronicle’s reporting is accurate, then he and his office must act with greater restraint given the state’s influence over Penn, a private institution, and the potential for overreach.
The Chronicle notes that when President Jameson took office, Penn was working to reclaim $31 million in funding for its veterinary school and $1.8 million designated for the Penn Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases that had been withheld by the Pennsylvania legislature over antisemitism concerns. When faced with the loss of so much funding, many institutions, even those as wealthy as Penn, will be quick to fall in line with the state’s demands.
This backdoor approach to regulating speech, known as jawboning, is both incredibly powerful and uniquely dangerous. The First Amendment only protects against state censorship, not private regulation of speech, so when the state pressures private institutions into censoring disfavored speech, it blurs the legal line between unconstitutional state action and protected private conduct. The Supreme Court unanimously condemned this practice in NRA v. Vullo, reaffirming its 60-year-old ruling that governments cannot use third parties to censor speech they disfavor. The Court explained that this practice would allow a government official to “do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly.”
Jawboning’s chilling effects go beyond the pressured institution itself. For example, Gov. Shapiro’s close involvement at Penn incentivizes campus leaders to over-enforce their anti-discrimination and harassment policies in ways that prohibit or chill what would otherwise be lawful speech. Rather than risk state interference, many institutions will censor first and ask questions later.
None of this is to say that Penn has a sterling history when it comes to managing speech controversies on its own. In fact, Penn finished second to last in FIRE’s 2023 campus free speech rankings. But the situation is likely to get worse, not better, when the government amplifies the impulse to censor.
Private universities are not subject to open-records laws like many public universities. At a public university, it is often possible to obtain records that reveal how or why the school changed a speech policy or engaged in censorship. By contrast, at a private university there is no formal way (besides the costly process of litigation) to request records that reveal the basis for such actions, including the extent to which they were the result of state pressure.
For example, after Penn’s tumultuous 2024 spring semester, the university adopted a vague and overbroad events and demonstrations policy. This policy prohibits “advocat[ing] violence” in all circumstances, even when it doesn’t cross the line into unprotected and unlawful conduct or speech, like incitement or true threats. Moreover, the policy fails to define “advocat[ing] violence.” This leaves students guessing and will lead to administrative abuse and uneven enforcement. Is the common but controversial slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” a call for violence in Israel or a call for political change? Calling for U.S. bombing of terrorist groups like ISIS or Al-Qaeda is explicitly advocating violence. Is that prohibited? Under Penn’s new policy, that’s left to administrators to decide.
FIRE criticized this policy at the time and expressed concern that it was driven in part by viewpoint discrimination. But at a private university like Penn, there is no public records mechanism for the public to scrutinize how or why the policy was adopted. And although private universities are generally well within their rights to keep these decisions private, this arrangement becomes more troublesome when the state gets involved.
Private universities themselves have free speech rights. A federal district court recently reiterated as much, explaining that the Trump administration violated the First Amendment when it conditioned funding to Harvard on the university “realigning its campus to better reflect a viewpoint favored by the government.”
Harvard, like Columbia and many other institutions, has been the target of a federal pressure campaign purportedly aimed at combatting antisemitism. But unlike Columbia, Harvard chose to defend its rights in court. This stand is praiseworthy, and the district court’s decision shows that private institutions stand on solid legal ground when they resist unlawful government pressure. Unfortunately, not every institution will be bold enough, or sufficiently well resourced, to fight the state in court.
Given these dangers, Gov. Shapiro and other government actors seeking to combat discrimination must act through the proper legal channels. In the federal context, this means following the procedures laid out by Title VI and binding federal regulations. In its ruling for Harvard, the district court explained that this process is designed to ensure that recipients of federal funding “are shielded against being labeled with the ‘irreversible stigma’ of ‘discriminator’ until a certain level of agency process has determined that there was misconduct that warranted termination.” In other words, this process is a check on government overreach and all the harms that entails. The same principle applies to states trying to combat discrimination within their borders.
Enforcing valid anti-discrimination laws is important. But there’s a significant danger when state actors attempt to use the rationale of anti-discrimination to regulate speech at private universities. If left unchecked, this backdoor regulation risks turning private universities into de facto extensions of the state — undermining both academic freedom and the First Amendment itself.
We get it: not everyone is a free speech expert. A huge part of our job at FIRE is educating the public about their First Amendment rights, the scope of free speech law, and the foundational principles that make free expression so important.
Most people don’t have the time to get in the weeds like we do, so it’s understandable for the average American to sometimes get things wrong about free speech. But when you’re the attorney general of the United States, like Pam Bondi, you really should know better.
While discussing the assassination of Charlie Kirk and campus antisemitism on The Katie Miller Podcast, Bondi said the Justice Department would investigate and prosecute incidents of “hate speech.” While she’s trying to go into damage control mode and walk back some of her mistakes, it’s important to correct our nation’s chief law enforcement officer on what is and isn’t protected expression.
There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech. And there is no place — especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie — [for that] in our society.
This is, to put it bluntly, absolutely false — so-called “hate speech” is free speech.
The idea that “hate speech” is a separate and unprotected category of expression is one that we, unfortunately, have had to debunk time and time again. The fact is there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment, and there can’t be. The Supreme Court has rejected the notion on multiple occasions, and the reasons for this should be obvious to someone in Bondi’s position.
What constitutes “hate speech” is inherently subjective, so it’s impossible to narrowly define it in a way that passes constitutional muster — let alone in a way that doesn’t empower the government to target speech it disfavors.
As Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan II wrote in 1971’s Cohen v. California, “one man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric.” Or as Justice Samuel Alito wrote in Matal v. Tam almost four decades later, “the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’” In that case, the Court unanimously found that the government couldn’t deny a trademark to an Asian-American band called the Slants because it found the name disparaging.
Some consider criticism of Israel or Black Lives Matter to be hate speech. Others believe criticizing LGBTQ+ advocacy or Christian conservatism fits the description. And some, like President Trump, want to push the idea that even critical news coverage of an elected official — namely, him — can be a form of hate speech.
Apart from the inescapably subjective sentiment that “hate speech is any speech I hate,” the only thing on which proponents of treating hate speech as unprotected agree is the desire to punish it. This apparently includes Pam Bondi:
We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.
This is absolutely chilling. It’s why carving out a “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment is so dangerous. It grants the government the power not only to decide what constitutes hateful speech, but to punish it. And that dual empowerment inevitably facilitates attacks on the right to dissent, criticize, and hold accountable whoever is in power. Nothing is more antithetical to what America stands for than enabling federal speech police.
Early this morning, Bondi published a post on X, attempting to clarify her comments after a wave of negative response. Unfortunately, she only introduced more confusion:
Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It’s a crime. For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over.
While Bondi is correct that speech satisfying the stringent standard for what constitutes a true threat of violence is not protected by the First Amendment, she seems to effectively equate it with so-called “hate speech.” She goes on:
Under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c), it is a federal crime to transmit “any communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another.” Likewise, 18 U.S.C. § 876 and 18 U.S.C. § 115 make it a felony to threaten public officials, members of Congress, or their families.
Bondi is narrowly correct here. In 2003’s Virginia v. Black, the Supreme Court defined true threats as “those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.”
However, Bondi quickly shows that she doesn’t understand this narrow exception, which doesn’t cover abstract advocacy of violence or “cheering on” political violence — speech that is, in fact, protected:
You cannot call for someone’s murder. You cannot swat a Member of Congress. You cannot dox a conservative family and think it will be brushed off as “free speech.” These acts are punishable crimes, and every single threat will be met with the full force of the law.
Actually, you can call for someone’s murder as long as you’re not inciting it. In the landmark Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Court established that there is a difference between speech promoting unlawful action and the unlawful action itself. That speech only loses First Amendment protection when it is “directed to and likely to produce imminent lawless action.” The reason for this is to protect our ability to engage in sharp, critical, and even incendiary language — because political speech, as the Supreme Court noted in 1969’s Watts v. United States, “is often vituperative, abusive, and inexact,” and we don’t want a particular politician or administration deciding for everyone when it’s too hateful or offensive.
Is hate speech protected by the First Amendment? The First Amendment makes no general exception for offensive, repugnant, or hateful expression.
Like hate speech, Bondi also fails to define “doxxing.” It often refers to the intentional release of an individual’s personal identifying information without their permission — though many use the term more liberally, for example, to refer to posting video of ICE agents performing their duties in public. Disclosing truthful information about others is generally protected unless done in a way that amounts to a true threat or incitement.
Mercifully, Bondi ended her tweet with something to which we don’t object:
Free speech protects ideas, debate, even dissent but it does NOT and will NEVER protect violence.
You’ll get no argument from us there. Words are words, and violence is violence. And the distinction makes all the difference: Protect speech. Punish violence.
What Bondi fails to recognize is the critical importance of protecting ideas, debate, and dissent is why there is no First Amendment exception for so-called “hate speech” — and why there never should be.
Charlie Kirk himself would have agreed:
We’re joined by award-winning author, Charles (Charlie)
Slack, to discuss his book,
Liberty’s First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson and the Misfits Who Saved
Free Speech.
Slack focuses on the infamous
Sedition Act of 1798, which sparked the first major
controversy over freedom of speech in America.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro (including note about Charlie Kirk)
03:59 Book origins
12:05 What were the Alien and Sedition Acts?
16:00 Prosecutions under the Act and their free speech
implications
25:35 Free speech during the Revolutionary era
28:14 Adams’ perspective on the Sedition Act
46:02 Was Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase a
partisan hack?
53:57 Sedition Act fallout
01:01:02 Outro
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The sickening assassination of Charlie Kirk at a campus speech this week has brought attention to worrying trends in political violence and the public’s stated support for it.
According to FIRE’s annual College Free Speech Rankings survey, in 2020, the national average showed about 1 in 5 students said it was ever acceptable to use violence to stop a speaker. That number has since risen to a disturbing 1 in 3 students.
While we have seen no evidence that Kirk’s shooter is a student, there’s no doubt that the 50% increase in this level of support for political violence among college students over the last 5 years has broad implications for the future of the country.
When we subdivide by party affiliation, we see a more complete story, but the trends are roughly the same.
Students who identify as “Strong Democrats” are one of the few groups that haven’t markedly increased in support for using violence to stop a speaker, but only because they started at a higher rate of acceptance. Once the second most accepting of violence, they are now the second least accepting, thanks to a rise in acceptance by other groups. In other words, they didn’t get better — everyone else got worse. But consistently the worst group of all remains those who identify as “Something else.”
The portions of “Strong Republicans” and “Republicans” who accept the use of violence to stop a speaker have more than tripled in four years. Even acceptance among “Independents” has more than doubled. To give you a sense of how bad things have gotten, the group that currently accepts violence the least, Republican-leaning independents, would have ranked alongside those who accepted it the most back in 2020.
Now let’s take a closer look at the problem by switching from party affiliation to examining specific ideologies:
Those students who are the furthest to the left have been the most accepting of violence for as long as we’ve asked the question. That includes very liberal and democratic socialist students. But a rising tide of acceptance of violence has raised all boats. Now, regardless of party or ideology, students across the board are more open to violence as a way to shut down a speaker. What was once an extreme and fringe opinion has become normalized.
Where do we go from here? Violence is antithetical to free speech, and political violence is wholly incompatible with — and toxic to — democracy. As FIRE Executive Vice President Nico Perrino put it, it is a cancer in our body politic. Hopefully, the horrific image of the assassination of a young father, in front of his family, during a campus speech will show students who say they support violence what that actually looks like in practice.
The great innovation of free speech is that we settle disputes with words and arguments, not violence. Too many have turned away from this principle. For the sake of all Americans, we must return to it.
The horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University is an unspeakable crime. But we must speak about its causes and how we can seek to reduce violence of this kind—and also how we must not seek to silence free speech in response.
Obviously, murder is an evil act in itself. But a political assassination of this kind is many magnitudes worse than the all-too-common murders we encounter every day in America.
Political violence undermines the sense of safety that’s essential to free and open debate. If controversial views inspire murder, then most of us will be reluctant to speak out honestly. Political violence and threats can be a powerful source of self-censorship. We need to end support for political violence of every kind on every side, from this terrible murder to the threats of violence against professors from all sides who express controversial views.
Political violence also breeds administrative censorship. Many of the campus bans on protests and suspensions and banishments of those accused of misconduct are done using the excuse of fear of violence. Safety becomes a simple defense for every act of repression, and Kirk’s murder may be used by campus officials to ban controversial speakers from all sides and to prohibit the kind of public discussion that Kirk was admirably engaged in when he was killed.
And political violence inspires political censorship, particularly when elected officials are looking for any excuse to suppress their ideological opponents. Donald Trump announced a campaign of retribution against leftists who harshly criticized Kirk: “For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it …”
It’s appalling that Trump would call for unconstitutional repression of this kind to “find” and “stop” any leftist who ever used mean rhetoric—and the organizations that fund or support them. Even if you believe (as I do) that prominent political leaders such as Trump—one of the worst offenders at nasty political rhetoric—should tone down their hatred, that doesn’t mean that everyone should restrain their rhetoric, and it certainly does not allow the government to punish those who choose to say harsh words.
Since we do not yet know who murdered Kirk or what the motives were, it’s bizarre to assign ideological blame for this violence. But even if the murderer turns out to be a leftist inspired by hateful essays about Kirk, we must not punish (or even condemn) people who denounced Kirk.
We need to condemn horrible violence of this kind from any source, but we cannot blame those who engage in political critique for the crimes of lunatics. Words do not cause violence, and censorship does not stop it. It’s bizarre that the party of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is now suggesting that mean tweets kill people.
Other Republican politicians urged repression as the response. Rep. Clay Higgins (a Louisiana Republican) called for massive censorship of anyone who “belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” calling for them to be “banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER,” to have their business licenses and permits and driver’s licenses revoked, and be “kicked from every school.”
By far the most disturbing finding in the latest free speech survey of college students released this week by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression was that the proportion of students willing to support physical violence to stop an offensive speaker on campus grew from 20 percent in 2022 to 34 percent in 2025. FIRE chief research adviser Sean Stevens noted, “This finding cuts across partisan lines. It is not a liberal or conservative problem—it’s an American problem.”
In FIRE’s survey, the growth in willingness to use violence to stop an offensive speaker over the past few years tracks directly with the growth in willingness to shout down speakers (from 62 percent to 71 percent) and to physically block students from attending a speech (from 37 percent to 54 percent).
The willingness of people to silence speech is connected to their willingness to support violence as just one further step to achieve that repression. Stopping political violence can’t be seen in isolation from stopping political censorship of all kinds. We need to view a commitment to free speech as an essential tool to help reduce political violence.
Censorship can become the training wheels for political violence. Once you are willing to dehumanize someone by stripping away their rights and silencing their speech, the kind of dehumanization necessary to violently attack them becomes easier to imagine. And once you’re willing to use political violence, the reality will always become more likely.
Alice Dreger at Heterodox Academy noted that after the problems we’ve seen with the heckler’s veto, “The shooter’s veto is a whole new level of terrorism endangering political speech in America.” But what if the shooter’s veto is just the logical extension of the heckler’s veto?
It’s worth noting that in another of the rare cases of violence against a campus speaker—at Middlebury College in 2017, when Charles Murray was attacked and Professor Allison Stanger was injured—the violence followed in the wake of the students shouting down Murray. Censorship and violence are often linked together, and both are common weapons of totalitarian regimes.
That’s why we must reject political violence in all its forms and begin with the steps of censorship that often lead to it. That’s also why we must reject censorship as an answer to political violence. Because censorship is the foundation of political violence, we cannot cure it with more censorship.
I disagreed with many of Kirk’s political views, but I liked some of his methods—organizing students and publicly engaging in debates on campus with critics (as he was doing when he was murdered).
As I noted back in 2017 for why colleges must recognize TPUSA chapters, “Although Professor Watchlist is morally wrong and a threat to academic freedom, that is not a good reason for a university to de-recognize a student group associated with it. Free speech applies even to those who oppose free speech. And the right of students to form organizations is an essential part of student liberty, even if that means criticizing faculty.” I wrote about those leftists who supported repression, “If you think only your political enemies will be subject to censorship by administrators, I think you are very mistaken.”
We need colleges to be safe spaces in the sense of physical safety from political violence and physical threats. We also need safety from professional retaliation, to ensure that people are not fired or silenced or punished for their beliefs. We must reject the use of repression to protect people from hearing offensive ideas, whichever side is being censored. By rejecting censorship, and making the open exchange of ideas an essential part of campus life that no violent act can take away, we can reduce the culture of political violence that endangers all of our voices.
The best tribute to Kirk would be for colleges and politicians and advocates on all sides to imitate the best of what he did—to create and approve student organizations that express controversial views and debate those who disagree, asking them to “prove me wrong.”
We are horrified by yesterday’s assassination of Charlie Kirk on the campus of Utah Valley University. We are horrified first and foremost because two children lost their father and a wife lost her husband. And we are further horrified because all of us at FIRE have dedicated ourselves to the defense of free speech and open debate on college campuses.
At their best, America’s colleges and universities provide a unique venue to discover truth, talk across lines of difference, and develop a deeper and fuller understanding of the world. Over the years, students and student groups have invited Kirk to speak at hundreds, if not thousands, of campuses. At these events, he would share his opinions and invite others to do the same. America must be an open society where this sort of debate can take place, where we feel safe to share our ideas in the public square, not just from behind bulletproof glass and bulletproof vests.
Sigmund Freud once said civilization started the day man first cast a word instead of a stone. He was right. Words are not violence. Words are what we use instead of violence to resolve our differences. We must not lose sight of this civilization-defining distinction.
Unfortunately, since 2021, we’ve seen a steady rise in support for violence in response to speech on campus. Earlier this week, we released our finding that one in three students express some support for the use of violence to stop a campus speech. That’s up from 20 percent only three years ago. While we do not know the identity of the gunman, what happened yesterday is indicative of a broader cancer in our body politic that we must address.
Rewarding threats of violence by taxing speech or silencing speakers will only invite more threats and more violence.
But it must not be addressed with censorship.
For more than 25 years, FIRE has challenged colleges that use speculative and amorphous security rationales to justify censoring controversial speakers. Through public records requests and other means, we’ve often found these rationales serve as a pretext to shut down debate and capitulate to demands for censorship. Indeed, according to our Deplatforming Database, Kirk was the subject of at least 14 attempts to stop him from speaking on campuses since 2021. Over the years, FIRE has repeatedly written to colleges that sought to silence Kirk’s organization and supporters.
Moving forward, we can expect colleges and universities to place even greater emphasis on security ahead of controversial speakers arriving on campus. But administrators must not pass security costs along to speakers or use security concerns as pretext to cancel a speaker’s appearance. They have a moral and legal obligation to redouble their efforts to protect free speech. Rewarding threats of violence by taxing speech or silencing speakers will only invite more threats and more violence.
Yesterday, an assassin’s veto silenced Charlie Kirk, just as it silenced the journalists and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo a decade ago, and just as it attempted to silence Salman Rushdie in 2022. But we cannot let the censors win. We cannot let violence prevail. We can and must come together in defense of our rights to be who we are and to speak our minds.
WASHINGTON, D.C., Sept. 9, 2025 – If America’s colleges could earn report cards for free speech friendliness, most would deserve an “F”— and conservative students are increasingly joining their liberal peers in supporting censorship.
The sixth annual College Free Speech Rankings, released today by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and survey partner College Pulse, show a continued decline in support for free speech among all students, but particularly conservatives. Students of every political persuasion show a deep unwillingness to encounter controversial ideas. The survey, which is the most comprehensive look at campus expression in the country, ranked 257 schools based on 68,510 student responses to a wide array of free speech-related questions.
The rankings come at a notable moment for free speech on college campuses: clashes over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a vigorous and aggressive culture of student activism, and the Trump administration’s persistent scrutiny of higher education.
“This year, students largely opposed allowing any controversial campus speaker, no matter that speaker’s politics,” said FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff. “Rather than hearing out and then responding to an ideological opponent, both liberal and conservative college students are retreating from the encounter entirely. This will only harm students’ ability to think critically and create rifts between them. We must champion free speech on campus as a remedy to our culture’s deep polarization.”
Loyola University, Chicago
Middlebury College
New York University
Boston College
University of California, Davis
Northeastern University
University of Washington
Indiana University
Columbia University
Barnard College
For the second time, Claremont McKenna has claimed the top spot in the rankings. Speech controversies at the highest-rated schools are rare, and their administrations are more likely to support free speech. The schools that improved their score the most, including Dartmouth College and Vanderbilt University, worked to reform their policies and recently implemented new programs that support free speech and encourage open discourse.
The lowest-rated schools are home to restrictive speech policies and some of last year’s most shocking anti-free speech moments, including threats to press freedom, speaker cancellations, and the quashing of student protests.
“Even one egregious anti-free speech incident can destroy students’ trust in their administration and cause a school to plummet in the rankings,” said FIRE Vice President of Research Angela C. Erickson. “If campus administrators, faculty, and students want to enjoy an atmosphere of trust on campus, they can start by protecting each other’s rights.”
Other key findings from the report include:
“More students than ever think violence and chaos are acceptable alternatives to peaceful protest,” said FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens. “This finding cuts across partisan lines. It is not a liberal or conservative problem — it’s an American problem. Students see speech that they oppose as threatening, and their overblown response contributes to a volatile political climate.”
Explore the full rankings here.
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
Katie Stalcup, Communications Campaign Manager, FIRE: 215-717-3473; [email protected]
AI speech is speech, and the government shouldn’t get to rewrite it. But across the country, officials are pressuring AI developers to bend outputs to their political preferences.
That danger isn’t theoretical. In July, Missouri’s (now former) Attorney General Andrew Bailey sent OpenAI a letter threatening to investigate the company. In it, Bailey accused their AI chatbot ChatGPT of partisan bias after it ranked President Donald Trump lowest among recent presidents on anti-Semitism. Calling the answer “objectively” wrong, Bailey’s letter cites Trump’s relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, the Abraham Accords, and his Jewish family ties as proof the ranking defies “objective facts.”
Although no lawsuit was filed, the looming threat no doubt put considerable pressure on the company to revise its outputs — a preview into how common and far-reaching such tactics will become if courts ever say, as some critics of AI are arguing, that AI speech isn’t explicitly protected by the Constitution.
Lawsuits against Character.AI — another chatbot geared more towards companionship and casual conversation — such as Garcia v. Character Technologies, Inc., show that judges are already being asked to decide whether AI outputs are speech or something else entirely. If courts adopt the view that AI isn’t protected by the First Amendment, nothing would stop government officials from just mandating outputs rather than applying pressure. That’s why FIRE filed an amicus curiae “friend-of-the-court” brief in this litigation to emphasize that the First Amendment shields this expressive technology.
Free expression shouldn’t rise and fall with the party in power, forcing AI engineers to reshape their models to fit every new political climate.
The First Amendment’s protections don’t vanish simply because artificial intelligence is involved. AI is another medium (or tool) for expression. The engineers behind it and the users who prompt it are practicing their craft in much the same way writers, directors, and journalists are practicing theirs. So when officials pressure AI developers to alter or delete outputs, they’re censoring their speech.
By framing ChatGPT’s ranking as “consumer misrepresentation,” Bailey tried to turn protected political speech into grounds for a fraud investigation. Instead of using consumer protection laws for their intended purpose — to, for example, investigate faulty toasters or false advertising — Bailey’s gambit bends them into mechanisms for censoring AI-generated speech. The letter signals to every developer that just one politically sensitive answer could yield a government investigation.
The irony here is striking: Bailey represented the state of Missouri in Murthy v. Missouri, the high-profile lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of jawboning social-media platforms into removing COVID-19 content. In that case, Bailey argued the federal government’s nudging violated the First Amendment because it coerced private actors to police speech the government couldn’t ban outright.
New polling shows voters fear AI — but fear government censorship more. As lawmakers push new rules, are they protecting elections or silencing speech?
Government pressure is already reshaping AI in other ways. OpenAI’s new policy now warns that your ChatGPT conversations may be scanned, reviewed, and possibly reported to the police. This means users are faced with a choice of whether to risk a visit from law enforcement or forgo the benefits these AI tools offer. Absent robust First Amendment safeguards, the result is government censorship (including jawboning) on one side, and surveillance on the other. Both narrow the space for open inquiry that AI ought to expand.
FIRE’s answer is for the government to first apply the First Amendment appropriately to AI speech, and then improve government transparency to ensure the government is doing so. Our Social Media Administrative Reporting Transparency (“SMART”) Act would require federal officials to disclose their communications with an interactive computer service (like a chatbot) about moderating content. This way users, developers, and the public can see when officials try to influence what AI says. Similar state-level reforms could ensure that no government coercion occurs in the dark.
Free expression shouldn’t rise and fall with the party in power, forcing AI engineers to reshape their models to fit every new political climate. If we want AI to widen the marketplace of ideas, strong First Amendment protections are the place to start.
What are the limits of presidential power? How many
days has it been since President Trump’s TikTok ban moratorium went
into place? What is the state of the conservative legal movement?
And where did former FIRE president David French
go on his first date?
French and Sarah Isgur
of the popular legal podcast “Advisory
Opinions” join the show to answer these questions and
discuss the few free speech issues where they disagree with
FIRE.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
02:18 Origin story of “Advisory Opinions”
08:15 Disagreements between FIRE and AO
15:04 Why FIRE doesn’t editorialize on the content of
speech
24:27 Limits of presidential power
43:30 Free speech, the dread of tyrants
51:01 The prosecution of political figures
58:01 Cracker Barrel
01:00:09 State of the conservative legal movement
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