Tag: speech

  • REPORT: More than 600 college students and student groups punished or investigated for speech in five years

    REPORT: More than 600 college students and student groups punished or investigated for speech in five years

    • 63% of over 1,000 efforts to suppress student speech resulted in administrative investigation or punishment.
    • In the wake of Hamas’s 2023 attack on Israel, administrators overtook students as the main instigators of attempted speech suppression.
    • Speech about race and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict led to most attempts.

    PHILADELPHIA, May 15, 2025 — A new report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that 637 college students and student groups were punished or investigated by administrators for their constitutionally protected expression between 2020-2024.

    “Students Under Fire” documents over 1,000 efforts to punish students for speech and expression over a five-year span, 63% of which resulted in some form of administrative punishment. The research provides the most detailed collection of speech-related campus controversies involving students to date. The underlying data will be compiled in an interactive database that will be regularly updated and searchable by the source of the outrage, demands made of the institution, whether the pressure is from the political left or right of the student’s speech, the outcome, and more.

    “Every instance of censorship threatens students’ ability to engage in a free exchange of ideas,” said FIRE Senior Researcher Logan Dougherty. “Open minds and free debate, not self-censorship and punishment, must be the standard across our nation’s campuses.”

    There were two dominant incendiary topics on campus: race and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The report found that following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, race was the topic that most commonly landed a student in hot water. The Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, and subsequent debates over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israel’s military response, then quickly became the topic that most often produced attempts at punishment. 

    Other notable findings from the report include:

    • The problem spans ideologies. When it comes to speech about race, most students are targeted from their left, while students speaking out about the war in Gaza are more likely to be targeted from their right.
    • Among the worst punishments were 72 students or groups who were suspended, 55 who were expelled, lost student group funding, or were otherwise separated from their university, and 19 more who were unenrolled under ambiguous circumstances. In one case, a student had to sleep in his car after his university kicked him out of campus housing. In another, a student was suspended for sending a survey about mental health to his peers.
    • The most frequently targeted or punished student groups spanned the political divide: Students for Justice in Palestine (75 incidents), Turning Point USA (65 incidents), and the College Republicans (58 incidents)

    The report also found that after a decade of surging efforts by students to silence campus speech, administrators have taken up the censorial mantle in the wake of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2020, only 27% of cases were initiated by administrators. By 2024, that number increased to 52%.

    “This is unacceptable coming from people whose job it is to serve college students and ensure that their rights are protected,” said FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens. “Their job should be to protect students’ free speech rights, not torpedo them.” 

    The First Amendment protects students at public institutions — and those institutions cannot legally punish students for the expression in the report (though they often do). Private institutions, though not directly bound by the First Amendment, often make institutional promises of free speech and academic freedom. FIRE advocates for targeted students at both types of institutions.

    Students at public institutions should contact FIRE if they face punishment for their expression by submitting a case.

    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.

    CONTACT
    Katie Stalcup, Communications Campaign Manager, FIRE: 215-717-3473; [email protected] 

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  • Could “Fear Equity” Revive Campus Free Speech? (opinion)

    Could “Fear Equity” Revive Campus Free Speech? (opinion)

    For most of the past decade, many professors lived in fear of challenging progressive beliefs on elite college campuses, beliefs that, as linguist John McWhorter argues, have often attained religious status. Saying the wrong word, or liking the wrong social media post, perhaps especially if one was a vocal member of an unfashionable minority, like Jews, could evoke ostracism from peers and even Twitter mobs demanding termination, followed by star chamber hearings led by unaccountable administrators.

    This was an inevitable consequence of ever-expanding conceptualizations of what constituted “harm” and various -isms (racism, sexism, etc.). University mandates requiring investigations for accusations of “harm” or “bias” inevitably incentivized some progressives, who are overrepresented in academia, to weaponize bureaucratic procedures to denounce, demonize and punish those they saw as violating sacred values. Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, reports that more professors were terminated for speech “offenses” in 2014–2023 than in the entire McCarthy era.

    The 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey found that 14 percent of the approximately 5,000 respondents reported having been disciplined or threatened with discipline by their institutions for their teaching, research or other speech. If that response generalizes to the population of American faculty, it means there have been tens of thousands of such investigations (or threats) over the last 10 years.

    The sense of fear was wildly inequitable, with far more conservatives than liberals reporting self-censoring. American universities suffered a decade of cancellations, terminations, harassment and even the odd death threat from the far left.

    Fear Equity?

    Now, thanks to the Trump administration’s—in our view questionable—policies regarding academia in general and elite institutions like Columbia and Harvard Universities in particular, policies that many plausibly view as political vengeance for leftist activism, higher education is rapidly approaching fear equity: The presidential right has joined the campus left in using intimidation to punish those whose speech they dislike. Now, everybody in academia gets to be afraid of being canceled, or at least having their grants canceled. Noncitizen students and faculty also have to fear being deported for expressing views that the Trump administration opposes. Conservative and centrist academics still have good reasons to fear their colleagues and students, as they have since 2014, but now, progressive peers have similar reasons to fear whatever comes next out of Washington.

    Is this an opportunity for free speech advocates? At first glance, it seems not. The solution to erosion of protections for heterodox free speech and academic freedom cannot possibly be vengeful restrictions on progressive speech. That is the road to expanding authoritarianism and eroding free speech environments for all, a tendency many current leaders in Washington would seemingly welcome.

    Academia’s Failure to Protect Nonprogressive Speech

    Nonetheless, academia’s record of restraining the censoriousness coming from within its ranks over the last decade has been abysmal. The American Association of University Professors, once a nonpartisan bulwark against censorship, jettisoned its principled support for free speech in focusing almost entirely on threats from the right while, in higher education, our (and AAUP’s) primary concern, most censorship came from the left. The AAUP’s recent statements endorsing the use of DEI criteria in hiring and promotions and the legitimacy of academic boycotts are seemingly designed to cement progressive orthodoxy over the professoriate.

    In just months, President Trump has demonstrated the error of AAUP’s “free speech for me but not for thee” positions, as Nat Hentoff put it in his book of that title. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the AAUP will interpret this as “time to take principled stances for speech and academic freedom for all of our faculty” rather than “Trump is evil incarnate, so we should double down on imposing progressive politics.”

    The last 10 years have been disastrous for free speech on campus. As Occidental College professor and Free Black Thought cofounder Jake Mackey recently wrote in “The last four years were the most repressive of my lifetime,” “It was fear of retaliation from the left, not from a fascist leader, that caused me to lay awake at night on more occasions than I can count, terrified that a student might have misinterpreted something I said in class and initiated a cancelation campaign against me.”

    Polling data bear this out, as Sean Stevens and his coauthors report in “Ostrich Syndrome and Campus Free Expression,” a chapter in our co-edited book, The Free Inquiry Papers (AEI Press, 2025). Conservative professors are more than twice as likely as liberal peers to report self-censoring. This is a rational response to reports showing that, within academia, “cancellation” attacks—attempts to punish faculty for their speech—are more likely to come from their left than their right. Risking one’s livelihood is not usually worth it.

    There is also evidence raising the possibility that support for censorship and for antisemitism was spread in part through shadowy foreign donations. A 2024 report, which one of us (Jussim) co-authored, found that universities underreported billions of dollars in funding from foreign sources (revealed after a Department of Education investigation). Worse, receipt of funding from authoritarian regimes and from member states of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation was statistically associated with deterioration of free speech and heightened antisemitism on campus.

    Follow-up research in progress is examining the hypothesis that this foreign financial assistance helped organize anti-Israel student groups and whole academic departments. As Lukianoff reported in “How Cancel Culture Destroys Trust in Expertise” at the recent Censorship in the Sciences conference held at the University of Southern California, protests by such groups were almost “exclusively responsible” for disruptions of campus speakers in 2024, which he called “the worst year we know of in history for campus deplatforming.” (To its credit, FIRE protects the rights of both pro- and anti-Israel speakers.)

    Notably, some campuses are far worse on free speech than others. A FIRE faculty survey released last December revealed that a remarkable 63 percent of Columbia faculty reported self-censoring at least occasionally; they identified the Israel-Hamas conflict as the most difficult issue to discuss on campus, with affirmative action second. That the far left has imposed a regime of denunciation and fear on many college campuses is beyond doubt.

    Trump’s Attacks on Free Speech and Academic Freedom

    But under President Trump, the right is making up for lost time. The Trump administration’s attempt to cut indirect costs on grants could be viewed as a genuine attempt to reduce wasted tax dollars. However, given that they have not reported any analysis of how indirects are used, many see this as a straightforward attack designed to cut academia down to size for its leftist politics. The administration has also disrupted the academic study of topics related to diversity, equity, inclusion, prejudice, inequality and oppression by defunding almost every grant to study these important issues. While faculty are not entitled to federal grant dollars and the federal government has the legitimate right to set funding priorities, the Trump administration has also attempted to ban any funding on any topic from universities that have DEI programs that the administration believes engage in discrimination. These policies will chill academic discourse.

    Furthermore, even if ultimately found to be legal (which we doubt), the Trump administration’s targeting for deportation of immigrants who have allegedly expressed support for Hamas further retards the robust exchange of ideas on campus. And these efforts are succeeding; the rapid capitulation of institutions such as Columbia to Trump’s demands has been dubbed “The Great Grovel” by Politico.

    Toward the Rediscovery of Principled Defenses of Speech and Academic Freedom

    Is it possible that the new fear equity, with both left and right afraid to speak their minds, may be a necessary precondition to pave the way for a free speech renaissance? There is historical precedent for this possibility. It would be a mirror image of the way that McCarthy-era repression set the stage for a raft of Supreme Court cases that dramatically strengthened legal protections for free speech. Yet judges cannot be everywhere and lawsuits cannot change culture.

    Now that censorship is bipartisan, both the left and right have incentives to rediscover principled defenses of free speech, including for their opponents. As James Madison counseled in Federalist Paper No. 51, the best protection of freedom is self-interest, and now, on free speech, all sides have it. Alternatively, to take a more positive view centered on political education, it may take having one’s own speech threatened, or that of one’s allies, before one fully understands the value of constitutional protections of free speech and institutional protections of academic freedom.

    An Action Agenda

    What can be done to reinvigorate a culture of free and open inquiry, debate, and speech on America’s college campuses? Quite a lot. Last year, as reported here, House Republicans passed a horribly titled (“End Woke Higher Education Act”) but conceptually sound campus free speech bill prohibiting ideological litmus tests in faculty hiring and institutional accreditation, protecting the rights of faith-based groups to determine their membership and assuring that speech limitations cannot be selectively enforced, as when conservative or pro-Israel speakers must pay “security fees” waived for liberal or pro-Palestine speakers. Just four Democrats voted yea and the then-Democratic Senate showed no interest. (In fairness to Senate Democrats, the House bill passed near the end of the congressional session.) Sponsor Burgess Owens, Republican of Utah, is expected to reintroduce the bill, and given Republican majorities in the House and Senate and Democrats’ newfound interest in free speech, its prospects for passing should be improved.

    Yet federal legislation can never solve the whole problem. Norms and social practices matter more than law with respect to creating a free speech culture on campus. What can institutions of higher education do to strengthen an intellectual culture of freewheeling discourse, inquiry and debate? First, they can adopt a formal statement of their commitment to free speech and academic freedom, such as the Chicago principles or the Princeton principles.

    Second, campuses can restrict the bureaucratic overreach of DEI bureaucracies and institutional review boards, both of which can and do threaten and erode faculty free expression. Third, the best way to limit overreach of existing bureaucratic units may sometimes be to create another bureaucratic unit explicitly designed to do so. An Office of Academic Freedom that is mandated to ensure faculty rights are not infringed by DEI units, IRBs, chairs, deans or anyone else, might go a long way toward protecting faculty.

    We would prefer deep and principled commitments to free speech and academic freedom to be the font from which such reforms spring. But if the only way we will get reforms is through fear equity, we’ll take it.

    Lee Jussim is a Distinguished Professor of psychology at Rutgers University and creator of the Unsafe Science Substack. Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Together, they were among the co-editors of The Free Inquiry Papers (AEI Press, 2025) and among the co-founders of the Society for Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science.

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  • Alumni seek to rewaken the forgotten fight for free speech at UC San Diego

    Alumni seek to rewaken the forgotten fight for free speech at UC San Diego

    History is rarely lost all at once. More often, it slips away — one forgotten battle at a time.

    For Daniel Watts, that revelation arrived with the quiet ping of an alumni email. The Guardian, the campus newspaper at the University of California, San Diego, was seeking alumni donations to stave off financial collapse. Watts, who used to write for the paper, took interest — and noticed something unusual.

    Buried in their appeal, the editors blamed The Guardian’s decline, in part, on a now-defunct satirical campus paper. The Koala, informally known as “The Motherfucking Koala,” had a reputation for irreverence — in 2003, it published an issue titled Jizzlam, a parody of Playboy Magazine for Muslim men. 

    But for Watts, The Guardian’s jab at The Koala represented a fading understanding of the hard-won battles for a free press at UCSD.

    Censorship is like poison gas: effective when your enemy is in sight — but the wind has a way of shifting.

    The Koala wasn’t just a juvenile snark sheet, but an unruly bulwark of the First Amendment. In 2015, after lampooning “safe spaces,” The Koala faced defunding efforts by a student government, prodded by administrators. But with the help of FIRE and the ACLU, they fought back and won. In The Koala v. Khosla, a federal appeals court affirmed that public universities can’t defund a student publication just because they dislike what it prints, marking a victory for all campus newspapers — including The Guardian.

    But that history, along with nearly $800,000 in public funds that UCSD spent on litigation in an effort to silence its own students, now seems to have vanished. 

    “Reading that email,” says Watts, “and realizing that even the official student newspaper had no idea about UCSD’s history — or the sacrifices made to protect their right to publish — was a galvanizing moment.”

    He adds, “If the university won’t teach students the history and value of free speech, then who will?”

    Love, loyalty, and liberty: ASU alumni unite to defend free speech

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    The mission of ASU Alumni for Free Speech is to promote and strengthen free expression, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity, both on campus and throughout the global ASU community.


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    So Watts stepped into the breach, founding Tritons United for Free Speech, an independent group of UCSD alumni committed to defending free expression at their alma mater.

    Watts knows the terrain well. 

    As an undergraduate, he battled administrative efforts to censor TV broadcasts and student publications. Late nights were spent scrolling the internet and cold-calling local lawyers in search of anyone to defend them. 

    “No one ever answered,” he recalls. “FIRE would write letters, but they didn’t litigate back then and the ACLU was spread thin. We were on our own.”

    It was a lonely education but a clarifying one. Watts decided to go to law school. “I wanted to be the kind of lawyer who would pick up the phone,” he says. 

    Over the past 15 years, Watts has built a robust legal career defending the First Amendment rights of students and journalists across California, arguing an anti-SLAPP case before the California Supreme Court and even running for governor in 2021 on a platform of “Free Speech. Free College.” 

    Now, through Tritons United for Free Speech, Watts is channeling those lessons into a new kind of advocacy. The group’s mission is threefold: educate students about the history of free speech, especially at UCSD; reform campus policies that stifle free expression; and connect students under fire with alumni who can offer legal aid, journalistic expertise, or public advocacy.

    “Students are like a country without an army,” says Watts. “They have moral suasion, but they lack resources — funding for litigation, experience navigating bureaucracy, or simply the wisdom of age. Alumni bring all that, as well as staying power and historical memory.”

    But the fight won’t be easy. 

    FIRE’s most recent College Free Speech Rankings place UCSD at a middling 133 out of 251 schools overall. More troublingly, UCSD ranks 205th on the question of whether students feel comfortable expressing ideas. Among UCSD students surveyed, 78% say shouting down a speaker is sometimes acceptable; 28% say using violence to stop speech is sometimes acceptable; and 48% say they self-censor on campus at least once or twice a month.

    These numbers reflect a striking cultural shift. 

    “When I was at UCSD in 2001,” Watts recalls, “the student government would occasionally vote on whether to defund The Koala. Every time, it was unanimous — 20 to 0 against censorship.”

    By 2015, the vote was again unanimous — 22 to 0, with 3 abstentions — but this time to defund The Koala. Even The Guardian greeted the news with a gloating article, quoting the immortal words of American diplomat Paul Bremer after the fall of Saddam Hussein: “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!”

    Watts was appalled. “You’re a newspaper! And you’re celebrating censorship?!”

    Today, he fears, many students seem to believe that free speech is conditional. Good for me, but not for thee. They’ve forgotten, or more likely have never learned, as former ACLU Executive Director Ira Glasser warns, censorship is like poison gas: effective when your enemy is in sight — but the wind has a way of shifting.

    As students cycle through every four years, faculty grow fearful of speaking out, and administrators grow ever entrenched with power, institutional memory slowly fades. 

    Alumni are the living link to that past — and the stewards of its future.

    “That’s why Tritons United for Free Speech exists,” Watts says. “And that’s why I’m not giving up.”

    If you’re ready to join Tritons United for Free Speech, or if you’re interested in forming a free speech alumni alliance at your alma mater, contact Bobby Ramkissoon at [email protected]. He will connect you with like-minded alumni and offer guidance on how to effectively protect free speech and academic freedom for all.

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  • Don’t let Texas criminalize free political speech in the name of AI regulation

    Don’t let Texas criminalize free political speech in the name of AI regulation

    This essay was originally published by the Austin American-Statesman on May 2, 2025.

    Texans aren’t exactly shy about speaking their minds — whether it’s at city hall, in the town square, or all over social media. But a slate of bills now moving through the Texas Legislature threatens to make that proud tradition a criminal offense.

    In the name of regulating artificial intelligence, lawmakers are proposing bills that could turn political memes, commentary and satire into crimes.

    Senate Bills 893 and 228, and House Bills 366 and 556, might be attempting to protect election integrity, but these bills actually impose sweeping restrictions that could silence ordinary Texans just trying to express their opinions.

    Take SB 893 and its companion HB 2795. These would make it a crime to create and share AI-generated images, audio recordings, or videos if done with the intent to “deceive” and “influence the result of an election.” The bill offers a limited safeguard: If you want to share any images covered by the bill, you must edit them to add a government-mandated warning label.

    But the bills never define what counts as “deceptive,” handing prosecutors a blank check to decide what speech crosses the line. That’s a recipe for selective enforcement and criminalizing unpopular opinions. And SB 893 has already passed the Senate.

    Vague laws and open-ended definitions shouldn’t dictate what Texans can say, how they can say it, or which tools they’re allowed to use.

    HB 366, which just passed the House, goes even further. It would require a disclaimer on any political ad that contains “altered media,” even when the content isn’t misleading. With the provisions applying to anyone spending at least $100 on political advertising, which is easily the amount a person could spend to boost a social media post or to print some flyers, a private citizen could be subject to the law.

    Once this threshold is met, an AI-generated meme, a five-second clip on social media, or a goofy Photoshop that gives the opponent a giant cartoon head would all suddenly need a legal warning label. No exceptions for satire, parody or commentary are included. If it didn’t happen in real life, you’re legally obligated to slap a disclaimer on it.

    HB 556 and SB 228 take a similarly broad approach, treating all generative AI as suspect and criminalizing creative political expression.

    These proposals aren’t just overkill, they’re unconstitutional. Courts have long held that parody, satire and even sharp political attacks are protected speech. Requiring Texans to add disclaimers to their opinions simply because they used modern tools to express them is not transparency. It’s compelled speech.

    Besides, Texas already has laws on the books to address defamation, fraud and election interference. What these bills do is expand government control over how Texans express themselves while turning political expression into a legal minefield.

    Fighting deception at the ballot box shouldn’t mean criminalizing creativity or chilling free speech online. Texans shouldn’t need a lawyer to know whether they can post a meme they made on social media or make a joke about a candidate.

    Political life in Texas has been known to be colorful, rowdy and fiercely independent — and that’s how it should stay. Vague laws and open-ended definitions shouldn’t dictate what Texans can say, how they can say it, or which tools they’re allowed to use.

    The Texas Legislature should scrap these overbroad AI bills and defend the Lone Star state’s real legacy: fearless, unapologetic free speech.

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  • For the rich, free speech — for others, a SLAPP in the face

    For the rich, free speech — for others, a SLAPP in the face

    This article was originally published in The Gilmer Mirror on April 21, 2025.

    Fourteen years ago, the legislature passed vital protections for freedom of speech in the Texas Citizens Participation Act. This week, they’re looking to gut it.

    The TCPA addresses the common problem of strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs. These are frivolous lawsuits brought by the wealthy or powerful against private citizens to stop them from exercising their free speech rights.

    For example, say your loved one is in an assisted living facility, and you think the facility is neglecting their care. You file a complaint with state regulators and then post honest, negative reviews of the facility online so that other people can make an informed choice about sending their family members there.

    Then the facility sues you, claiming that you defamed them. Even though the case is frivolous, and your criticism is protected by the First Amendment, you have a tough choice: stop talking about the facility or hire an attorney to defend you. You don’t want to be silenced, but you don’t want to go through a lengthy, expensive, and exhausting legal battle.

    This was the choice facing Carol Hemphill when she was sued for criticizing the facility housing her brother, who needed daily care after a traumatic brain injury.

    Thankfully, the TCPA helps people like Hemphill. It allows SLAPP victims to get cases dismissed quickly, without racking up huge legal bills. It also helps the victims get lawyers to stand up to the bullies trying to silence them through the courts.

    First, the TCPA lets a victim immediately move to dismiss the case if they can show the claim is meritless and targets their speech on issues important to the community. Then, if the court denies the motion to dismiss, there’s another layer of protection. The law automatically pauses any further court proceedings while the victim appeals the ruling, so that the case doesn’t turn into a sprawling legal battle before the court of appeals gets the chance to toss it out.

    When a victim successfully gets the case dismissed, the TCPA also requires the other side to pay their legal bills. This helps ensure SLAPP victims can afford legal representation to fight the case, and it deters people from filing SLAPPs in the first place. Plus, it’s just basic fairness: if someone deliberately brings a frivolous SLAPP against you, they should reimburse you for the costs of getting it dismissed.

    These protections ensure that everyone, not just those with money, can afford to fight for their rights. They helped Hemphill get her case dismissed and her legal bills paid. They helped Ken Martin, an independent local journalist, who was sued by a politician for reporting factual information about him. And they helped Dante Flores-Demarchi, who was sued by a wealthy school board member for publicly raising concerns about corruption.

    In addition to protecting individual victims, the TCPA protects a culture of open political discourse. In 2023, John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, testified against amending the TCPA because of its importance to individuals and organizations that work on important political issues. He testified that he, his organization, and other Texans had been hit with 19 different lawsuits simply for speaking about abortion after passage of the Texas Heartbeat Act, which banned most abortions in the state. “We turned to the TCPA since we were being targeted simply for our activism,” he said last year.

    Despite this enormous success, the legislature is currently considering bills to tear chunks out of the TCPA.

    This week, a House committee is going to vote on HB 2988, from Rep. Mano DeAyala, R-Houston, which would end the requirement for people who file SLAPPs to pay the other side’s legal bills when the case is dismissed. This would make it harder for SLAPP victims to get lawyers to defend their free speech rights, and invite more suits aimed at silencing people — a fundamental encroachment of constitutional rights.

    In the coming weeks, we expect other committees to take up SB 336/HB 2459. The bills, authored by Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, and Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, would remove the TCPA’s automatic pause while a victim appeals their motion to dismiss the SLAPP.

    The only people who benefit from weakening these parts of the TCPA are those with deep pockets who want to abuse the courts to silence their opponents. For those people, these bills are a gift.

    For Texans like Hemphill, who just want to speak their mind without being hauled into court, they’re a slap in the face.

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  • A New McCarthyism: How one Dane views free speech in America

    A New McCarthyism: How one Dane views free speech in America

    This article was originally published in The Dispatch on April 24, 2025.

    Two years ago, I moved to the United States to found a think tank devoted to defending global free expression. What better place to launch than America, which is, according to the law professor and First Amendment expert Lee Bollinger, “the most speech protective of any nation on Earth, now or throughout history”?

    Despite being Danish, I’ve always found America’s civil-libertarian free speech tradition more appealing than the Old World’s model, with its vague terms and conditions. For much of my career, I’ve been evangelizing a First Amendment approach to free speech to skeptical Europeans and doubtful Americans, who are often tempted by laws banning “hate speech,” “extremism,” and “disinformation.” That appreciation for the First Amendment is something I share with many foreigners — Germans, Iranians, Russians — who now call America home. For some of us, that tradition has become a kind of secular article of faith — the realization of which not only offers a sense of identity, but also a rite of passage into American ideals. Indeed, many of us noncitizens nodded in agreement in February when Vice President J.D. Vance said that European speech restrictions are “shocking to American ears.”

    But the very ideal that so many of us noncitizens cherish as America’s “first freedom” is now being curtailed. The administration is invoking a clause of the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952 that allows the secretary of state unfettered discretion to deport aliens, including anyone he believes “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” This new scheme has begun with the detaining of foreign students — including visa and green card holders — for allegedly antisemitic speech.

    Combating anti-Semitism is an important and legitimate government interest, and both Americans and noncitizens are safer when bigotry is confronted. But for six decades America has prohibited censorship and relied on counterspeech as the main bulwark against hatred, not least because leading Jewish and black civil rights groups have long recognized the danger of giving the government power over speech. Had the administration focused on noncitizens engaged in illegal or seriously disruptive conduct targeting Jewish students — which clearly occurred on some campuses after the October 7 terrorist Hamas attacks — few could have objected.  

    But it’s now clear that the government is targeting noncitizens for ideas and speech protected by the First Amendment. The most worrying example (so far) is a Turkish student at Tufts University, apparently targeted for co-authoring a student op-ed calling for, among other things, Tufts to divest from companies with ties to Israel. One report estimates that nearly 300 students from universities across the country have had their visas revoked so far.

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    Instead of correcting this overreach, the government has doubled down. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services recently announced that it would begin screening the social media posts of aliens “whose posts indicate support for antisemitic terrorism, antisemitic terrorist organizations, or other antisemitic activity.” Shortly after, the X account of USCIS posted about a “robust social media vetting program” and warned: “EVERYONE should be on notice. If you’re a guest in our country — act like it.” And four days later, White House homeland security adviser Stephen Miller promised to deport “anyone who preaches hate for America.” What that means is anybody’s guess — and seems to depend entirely on subjective assessments.

    This has created a wave of self-censorship among the millions of noncitizens who live, study, and work in the U.S. Conversations among expats now center on how many have stopped posting political content  or canceled travel abroad, fearing they won’t be let back in. Noncitizens in think tanks and public policy roles I have spoken to are using burner phones and keeping immigration lawyers on speed dial. Universities are advising foreign students and faculty not to publicly criticize the U.S. government or officials. Students are complying, even going so far as to ask to have their bylines removed from articles, refraining from peaceful protests and scrubbing their social media accounts. Even more surreal: People, including me, are receiving constant pleas from friends and family to come home, fearing what might happen if we stay. After all, this is America, not Russia.

    As a green card holder, I understand why so many foreign students, faculty members, and other legal residents who live in and love this country might prefer to stay silent—after all, they came here for a reason, whether to study, work, or start a life with loved ones. But silence would be a betrayal of the very values that brought many of us here in the first place. In fact, I can think of few things more un-American than having to self-censor out of fear of being targeted by the government.

    I came to America for its freedom, not just to enjoy it, but to defend it — even if that puts me at risk.

    This isn’t the first time America has targeted foreign dissenters. In 1798, President John Adams signed the Alien Act, giving himself sweeping power to deport any noncitizen from a friendly nation deemed “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States,” or merely “suspected” of treason or “secret machinations against the government.” In response, James Madison warned the law’s vague language “can never be mistaken for legal rules or certain definitions” and “subvert[ed] the general principles of free government.” Thomas Jefferson called it “a most detestable thing … worthy of the 8th or 9th century.” Their concerns were vindicated when Americans handed Adams’ Federalists a catastrophic defeat in the 1800 election, and the Alien Act expired under Jefferson.

    During the Red Scares of the 20th century, waves of government paranoia led to the surveillance, detention, and deportation of “subversive” noncitizens. McCarthyism has been roundly criticized in the decades since, and few have likely imagined that a McCarthy-era statute would not only survive but be revived and aggressively expanded in the 21st century.

    Credit: 1949 Herblock Cartoons, © The Herb Block Foundation.

    The late British-American journalist Christopher Hitchens is a more recent testament to the long tolerance of America toward foreign dissent. Before becoming a U.S. citizen in 2007, Hitchens spent decades as a legal resident—and as one of America’s most acerbic public intellectuals. He accused Ronald Reagan of being “a liar and trickster,” called Israel America’s “chosen surrogate” for “dirty work” and “terrorism,” lambasted Bill Clinton as “almost psychopathically deceitful,” and accused the George W. Bush administration of torture and illegal surveillance. If a student can be deported for writing a campus op-ed critical of Israel, any of Hitchens’ views could have been used to justify deporting him.

    Those applauding the recent crackdowns should remember how quickly the target can change. An overzealous administration focused on countering “Islamophobia” rather than antisemitism might have barred Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Salman Rushdie before they became citizens. The next might decide Douglas Murray crosses the line.

    Surely Secretary of State Marco Rubio knows this. In a recent interview, he warned that if Americans are denied entry to or face consequences in Europe for their online speech, it would undermine “one of the pillars of our shared values”—freedom of expression. Yet his own department now targets foreign nationals in the U.S. for the same online speech he was ostensibly protecting.

    Had America been known for deporting, rather than welcoming, dissent, I would never have made it my home. That might not have been much of a loss. But consider this: 35 percent of U.S.-affiliated academic Nobel laureates are immigrants, and nearly half of all American unicorn startups have founders born outside the country. How many of these brilliant minds would have chosen the United States if they risked exile for crossing the speech red lines of the moment?

    As a European who owes my freedom in life thus far to the America that fought Nazism and defeated communism, I feel a responsibility to speak out when this country strays from its founding ideals. I came to America for its freedom, not just to enjoy it, but to defend it — even if that puts me at risk.

    Jacob Mchangama is the executive director of The Future of Free Speech, a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He is the author of “Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media.“

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  • The OfS’s fine on Sussex is a blow against free speech, not for it

    The OfS’s fine on Sussex is a blow against free speech, not for it

    • Peter Scott is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Studies at UCL and was Vice-Chancellor of Kingston University between 1998 and 2010.

    Freedom of speech and academic freedom are difficult enough to define and police. The task has become more difficult because they have got caught up in the two most toxic issues of the moment – Palestinian rights and anti-Zionism (seen as shading into anti-semitism) on the one hand and support for the Israeli Government on the other; and women’s and trans rights and transphobia. Never has it been more true that hard cases make bad law.

    This seems to have been lost on the Office for Students with its recent decision on the Kathleen Stock case, whose gender-critical views had led to protests and demonstrations by trans activists, to fine the University of Sussex more than £500,000 (with the threat that fines could be even higher for universities which, in the eyes of the OfS, fail to protect free speech and academic freedom in a similar way). Unsurprisingly, that decision is being challenged by Sussex on a number of grounds, including the OfS’s refusal to meet the University’s representatives face-to-face before reaching it, a curious decision in the light of normal proceedings in legal and quasi-legal cases. Remember the lawyers’ old Latin tag audi alteram partem.

    The Stock case was one of three recent high-profile free speech cases. The two others were the case of David Miller, the University of Bristol professor who won an employment tribunal case after his dismissal by the University for his anti-Zionist views and that of Jo Phoenix, the Open University (OU) professor who won a similar case for constructive dismissal following the University’s failure to support her when attacked for her gender critical views.

    The same two toxic issues were in play in all three cases. It is difficult to see how, from the OfS’s perspective, Bristol and the OU were not as much in breach as Sussex of the OfS’s regulatory condition E1 for failing to uphold the relevant public interest governance principles (ensuring staff have the freedom ‘to question and test received wisdom’ and ‘to put forward new ideas and unpopular opinions’ without placing themselves in jeopardy). Two separate employment tribunals found that this is exactly what happened to Professors Miller and Phoenix, although in the first case through gritted teeth. Constructive dismissal and dismissal certainly count as being placed ‘in jeopardy’.

    The OfS opened its investigation into ‘free speech matters’ at Sussex under the general powers it had under its regulatory framework. The fine was assessed within the same framework. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which has given the OfS extra powers to investigate individual complaints, had not yet been passed. In any case, the incoming Labour Government chose last year not to implement some key provisions in that Act. So, when it launched the Sussex enquiry, the OfS did not yet have the power to investigate individual cases. Officially, it did not do so in the case of Kathleen Stock, although it appears she was interviewed as part of the investigation.

    So it remains a mystery why the OfS decided not to investigate the Miller and Phoenix cases which, on the face of it, raised the same issues and, as a result, should have led to the same concern – and similar fines? Surely not because of the political and media firestorm that the Stock case set off. Instead, the OU was allowed to ‘mark its own homework’ by setting up the Dandridge review, which failed to placate Professor Phoenix. Bristol publicly expressed its ‘disappointment’ at the tribunal’s findings, so no regrets and no acknowledgement that free speech had been an issue. The involvement of employment tribunals was no bar to an OfS investigation. Any differences between the three cases cannot explain why Sussex was picked out, because the OfS did not carry out investigations into the other two cases and so could not be aware of any differences.

    The OfS report is a curious document. It is largely context-free, in the sense that Professor Stock’s case is so briefly sketched that anyone unfamiliar with the case would find it difficult to understand what had happened. The formal reason for this context-lite brevity is that the OfS was not investigating what had happened to Professor Stock. Officially there was no Stock case. But a more substantial reason surely is that this absence of context was necessary in the light of its claim, in the words of the Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom, Professor Arif Ahmed, that ‘The OfS will continue to focus on a protection and promotion of lawful speech – irrespective of the views expressed. We will continue to be impartial and viewpoint neutral in our regulation and decisions’.

    In truth, free speech and academic freedom, even within the law, can never be absolute. This is explicit in section 43 of the Education (No. 2) Act of 1986 which states that universities ‘must take such steps as are reasonably practical to ensure that freedom of speech within the law is secured’. ’As are reasonably practical’ is an essential phrase, to which I will return. There will always be views which it is lawful to express but nevertheless are highly objectionable in the eyes of many people, and especially of those who feel they are threatened.

    Nor can they really be ‘viewpoint neutral’. The two toxic issues under discussion demonstrate this clearly. The expression of anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist views, because it is sometimes in danger of shading into anti-Semitism, is treated as beyond the pale. Gender-critical views, in contrast, despite the fact that they may be perceived to be transphobic, are firmly within it. The former, therefore, deserve to be banned and universities that tolerate their expression stigmatised or punished; the latter to be protected and universities that do not do so punished – as Sussex has been with its hefty fine. To be clear, I am not expressing an opinion about these viewpoints, just highlighting how they are treated differently.

    Why? Both Jewish and trans people, rightly or wrongly, feel threatened by what for them are hostile views. That is not sufficient in itself to override freedom of speech or academic freedom which, remember, are expected to be ‘unpopular’. This difference in treatment can only be explained with reference to history and politics. But, if the definition, and protection, of free speech and academic freedom are essentially political, the ‘viewpoint neutrality’ espoused by the OfS is an illusion. Its own decision to investigate Sussex was clearly partisan. The 2023 Act, which gave the OfS the mandate to investigate individual complaints, arose in a particular political context. It reflected the belief that conservative viewpoints were unwelcome in universities and therefore needed to be protected. Protecting liberal views was never the game.

    If free speech and academic freedom are context-specific, two questions arise. The first is practical. If that context is to be assessed and common sense applied – or, in the phrase in the 1986 Act, steps ‘as are reasonably practical’ defined – who is best placed to do that? In short, who is competent to make these complex decisions in which competing, and passionate, differences must be balanced? The effective choice is between officials in a State agency who are likely to have limited experience at the sharp end of university management, and vice-chancellors, their senior colleagues and university communities at large who know the people and personalities and real-world contexts. Free speech cases will not always be straightforward. They may contain multiple strands – breakdowns in professional relationships, complaints by students (ostensibly sovereign ‘customers’), even underperformance.

    The second question is one of principle, and much more important. In a liberal democracy that aspires to be an open society, should the State, or State agencies, ever be allowed to decide these delicate issues, particularly with regard to academic freedom, in the process invading and inevitably reducing the autonomy of universities? Of course, authoritarian and totalitarian States routinely behave in this way. They have no interest in academic freedom. But in a democracy, a foundational principle of academic freedom is surely that it is not defined or policed by the political authorities.

    The only conceivable justification for State intervention in a free society is that, if universities do not protect freedom of speech, they must be made to do so, as the partially implemented 2023 Act prescribes. There are two answers to this.

    • First, during the modern era, the practice has always been to trust universities to protect academic freedom because they understand it best. When I was a member of the board of the former Higher Education Funding Council for England two decades ago, no one would have suggested that HEFCE should have the power to fine universities for failing to uphold free speech. What is truly chilling is the erosion of institutional autonomy, with remarkably little protest or pushback. It is interesting how the political right, while believing passionately in a small State in the context of public services, economic regulation and taxation, believes equally passionately in a very strong State in the context of ideological surveillance.
    • Second, is there really a problem here – or, more accurately, a new problem? There is little evidence that universities have become less trustworthy in terms of protecting academic freedom. Of course, there have always been issues with ‘viewpoint diversity’ (in the phrase used by the US Government to justify its assault on Harvard – I’m coming on to Trump next…). In Economics departments dominated by econometricians behavioural economists are not always welcome. Some education departments may have ‘coloniality’ on the brain. Even peer review or the Research Excellence Framework may have ‘chilling effects’ in certain circumstances. But overall universities have always known, better than politicians, that intellectual creativity and productivity depend on a variety and diversity of ideas and of people.  

    … which brings me finally to Trump and Harvard. In a crooked sense, we should be grateful to President Trump for his brutish honesty. No serious attempt to disguise partisanship beneath a cloak of dispassionately protecting all free speech and academic freedom, just the driving desire to punish America’s greatest universities for refusing to toe the MAGA line in an extraordinary spasm of national self-harm. Harvard has been asked, and bravely refused, to allow the US Government to carry out ‘audits’ of departments suspected of being ‘woke’, to influence admissions, to vet academic appointments, to have access to lists of students, especially international students, who have taken part in demonstrations against Israel’s actions in Gaza, and outlaw all policies designed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.

    The US example is important for two reasons, however little the OfS may appreciate being bracketed with Trump. First, the political focus on free speech, in the current form of the ‘war on woke’, has all the marks of being ‘made in America’, ideology borrowing rather than truly home-grown. Now we have been shown the future, and it stinks. Do we really want to go there? Second, the same politically partisan focus has actually made it more difficult to have a measured debate about free speech and academic freedom which, very sadly, is badly needed in a world from which reason, trust and mutual respect appear to have fled – and online abuse, fake news and AI have arrived. The OfS report on Sussex, and its disproportionate fine, are – in effect – a blow against rather than a blow in favour of free speech in higher education.

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  • Speech Was Not Free in 1964. The Campus Movement (Thirteen PBS)

    Speech Was Not Free in 1964. The Campus Movement (Thirteen PBS)

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  • Key Takeaways From Higher Ed Free Speech Conference

    Key Takeaways From Higher Ed Free Speech Conference

    The University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement held its annual virtual #SpeechMatters conference Thursday amid a speech environment that is vastly different and far more fraught than anyone could have imagined even a few months ago. The Trump administration is simultaneously punishing colleges for their failure to clamp down on pro-Palestinian protesters and detaining international students, in some cases for participating in those same protests.

    In her opening remarks, Michelle Deutchman, the center’s executive director, acknowledged as much: “Today we gather at a critical moment for higher education across the nation,” she said. “The role of colleges and universities in our democracy is being questioned. Trust in institutions is shifting. The impact of a historic national election and a year of campus protests continues to unfold.”

    The conference, which featured four panels and 15 speakers with expertise in free speech and higher education, covered not only campus speech but also the broader questions of trust in universities and the knowledge they produce. Here are five key takeaways from the event.

    1. College administrators can’t prevent the chilling effect President Trump’s actions are having on campuses.

    In one session, Deutchman asked Howard Gillman, chancellor at the University of California, Irvine, for 12 years, and Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, how students can exercise their right to free speech despite the Trump administration’s crackdown on institutions and students alike for purported antisemitic speech.

    Gillman and Chemerinsky found a consensus—one that contradicts the widely held belief that universities should always be forums for political discussion: As long as Trump appears to be punishing individuals for constitutionally protected speech, now may not be the time to encourage students to speak out.

    “When you have an administration that has not yet been constrained by the courts sufficiently, it does create an environment where people might know they have, in theory, legal protections for the activities they engage in, but just because your activity may be protected doesn’t meant that you are not going to be put in a very complicated situation if the government does move forward,” Gillman said. “I don’t want to overstate the amount of reassurance that you can give. A chilling environment is a chilling environment.”

    Chemerinsky said it wasn’t tenable to assure students that he could protect them from the federal government. One student had asked him if the law school could prevent Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from coming onto campus and detaining students, and Chemerinsky said he had to tell the student that wouldn’t be possible. (In February, Trump rolled back protections that stopped immigration enforcement actions from taking place in certain locations, including on college campuses.)

    “There’s a limit to what we can do to protect students. I don’t want to ever have students have the illusion that we can do more than we can,” he said.

    1. Rebuilding trust in higher ed requires a fundamental shift in culture.

    When discussing the lack of trust in higher education, Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a columnist for Inside Higher Ed, said the distrust exists not just between the government and colleges, or administrators and faculty, but at all levels of higher education. Students erode trust with faculty when they don’t put effort into their courses, he said. Faculty who care more about their own research and success than their students and institutions likewise fail to build trust with their students and peers. And administrators earn the faculty’s distrust by leaving them out of key decision-making processes.

    It’s all a result of Americans’ shifting view of higher education from a public good to a private one, he argued, with students as the consumers and administrators as the CEOs.

    “It is absolutely imperative that we rebuild trust within our campuses,” he said. “It’s not a matter of policy tweaks; it’s a matter of a fundamental cultural shift.”

    He noted that in his own classes at UT Austin, he has made an effort to help students undertake real-world projects, like building an educational webpage for a local museum. Such efforts position the student not as a consumer, but as a “partner and collaborator and creator of knowledge,” he said. And it shows communities that college instills in its students important skills—and isn’t always just an amorphous ivory tower.

    1. Fast turnover of college leaders is contributing to the lack of public trust.

    In the same panel about trust, multiple speakers touched on the fact that administrative turnover can be a major impediment to trust-building on campus.

    University presidents last, on average, just over five years on the job, which means that most students see at least one presidential turnover in their college career. Each new president must rebuild trust not only with the constituents on their own campus, but also with alumni, government officials, the local community and beyond.

    Short tenures also make it difficult for students and employees to buy in to key university initiatives, considering it’s not uncommon for a new president to scrap the previous administration’s projects in favor of new priorities.

    “Trust is about relationships … and you don’t build trust overnight. You build trust through listening. You build trust through showing up. You build trust through showing proof points. That’s how it happens. So, you can’t build trust when you’re a president that’s been there three months,” said Bobbie Laur, president of Campus Compact, a nonprofit focused on civic and community engagement in higher education. “Some of what we’re facing is the reality of the short tenure of leaders without the necessary support structures to support leaders right now.”

    Saanvi Arora, a UC Berkeley student and the executive director of the Youth Power Project, a nonprofit that encourages young people to participate in public policy, agreed, noting that she has met numerous college students who have no idea what their institution’s president looks like.

    “That’s a huge problem, if you’re not meeting with students directly, showing up to spaces where it really matters for students to see you there,” she said. “It really makes a difference and moves the needle.”

    1. Universities need to do more to stanch the spread of misinformation.

    Misinformation is pervasive in the current vitriolic political environment, according to a panel of experts, but so is anger and skepticism toward the very researchers who aim to better understand the phenomenon.

    Simone Chambers, chair of political science at UC Irvine, pointed out that research shows misinformation is more likely to circulate in right-wing communities. But that research is then called partisan, sometimes even by politicians themselves; mis- and disinformation experts who studied incorrect information ahead of the 2020 election earned intense ire from congressional Republicans, who accused them of censoring free speech and subpoenaed data about what was being marked as inaccurate information.

    That’s compounded by the perennial problem of most, if not all, academic research: Few people see it. Michael Wagner, who leads the Center for Communication and Civic Renewal at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said that universities could make a greater effort to get the work of misinformation researchers into the public’s hands.

    Universities must do “a more aggressive job of promoting the work, even when it highlights partisan asymmetries, even when it highlights other kinds of things that might leave universities open to attack from those who don’t like the fact that universities exist,” said Wagner, who noted that his center has been subpoenaed by Congress. “[That] is something they need to do a better job of, to help the researchers who are trying to do this stuff get their work out there to folks so that they can engage with it and decide how they want to incorporate that information into how they live their lives.”

    1. More college leaders should stand up for higher education.

    Colleges have been capitulating to the Trump administration in everything from rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion programs to, in Columbia’s case, at least, agreeing to a list of the administration’s demands in the hopes of having its federal funding unfrozen.

    But a small number of college presidents—including Wesleyan University’s Michael Roth and Princeton University’s Christopher Eisgruber, who were both cited by panelists at the conference—have spoken forcefully against the Trump administration’s attacks on political speech, DEI and free scientific inquiry. In an op-ed in Slate about the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University alumnus and pro-Palestinian activist who was detained a month ago by immigration officials, Roth wrote, “University presidents must speak out against this attempt to control the political culture of our campuses from the White House. Just as we should decry antisemitism and other forms of discrimination, we should insist that students and faculty have the right to make their voices heard about the issues of the day. Neutrality here is a betrayal of our academic mission.”

    Kristen Shahverdian, program director of campus free speech at PEN America, a free expression nonprofit, said she is glad she doesn’t have to be a part of any internal conversations about how a university under fire by the Trump administration will react. Still, she said, she wishes more higher education leaders would emulate Roth and Eisgruber and that the higher education sector as a whole could come together as a united front.

    “There’s probably multiple reasons why they’re able to speak out and others maybe can’t,” she said. “[But] we really need to push back, to hold on to the values of higher education, which include freedom of expression and academic freedom.”

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  • Is there a global free speech recession?

    Is there a global free speech recession?

    We travel from America to Europe, Russia, China, and
    more places to answer the question: Is there a global free speech
    recession?

    Guests:

    –
    Sarah McLaughlin    : FIRE senior scholar, global
    expression

    –
    James Kirchick    : FIRE senior fellow

    – Jacob
    Mchangama    : FIRE senior fellow

    Timestamps:

    00:00 Intro

    03:52 Free speech global surveys

    07:49 Freedom of expression deteriorating

    11:43 Misinformation and disinformation

    18:05 Russian state-sponsored media

    24:55 Europe’s Digital Services Act

    29:26 Chinese censorship

    34:33 Radio Free Europe

    54:57 Mohammad cartoons

    01:04:14 Outro


    Read the transcript here.

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    [email protected].

    Show notes:

    – Authoritarians in the academy: How the
    internationalization of higher education and borderless censorship
    threaten free speech     Sarah McLaughlin (2025)

    – “The
    First Amendment created gay America    ” So to Speak (2022)

    – “Secret city: The hidden history of gay
    Washington    ” James Kirchick (2022)

    – “Who
    in the world supports free speech?    ” The Future of Free
    Speech (2025)

    – “V-DEM
    democracy report 2025: 25 years of autocratization — democracy
    trumped?    ” V-Dem Institute (2025)

    – Global
    risks report 2024     World Economic Forum (2025)

    – “Gay reporter kicked
    off Kremlin network after protesting anti-gay law    ”
    Washington Free Beacon (2013)

    –
    Free speech: A history from Socrates to social media
    (paperback)     Jacob Mchangama (2025)

    –
    Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA)     (2022)

    –
    Careless people: A cautionary tale of power, greed, and lost
    idealism     Sarah Wynn-Williams (2025)

    – “The
    Voice of America falls silent    ” The New York Times
    (2025)

    –
    Text of Havel’s speech to Congress     The Washington Post
    (1990)

    –
    Voice of America wins in court, for now, as judge blocks Trump
    administration from firing staff     AP News (2025)

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