Campus Chaos: Navigating free speech, unrest, and the need for reform in higher education

After decades of putting free speech on the back burner, colleges are reaping what they sowed

Police arrest a protestor at UT-Austin (Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman via AP)

Note: A version of this article appeared this past weekend in The Sunday Times of London. Also be sure to check out my recent interview with Jane Coaston in The New York Times.

College campuses in the United States — and even in the UK — continue to roil with protests, encampments, and even violence in response to the ongoing war in Gaza after October 7. Last week, the University of California, Los Angeles erupted as pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian protestors violently clashed with no intervention from local police, leading to 15 student injuries and at least one person being hospitalized. After weeks of encampment and tense interactions between protestors and police at Columbia University, pro-Palestinian students stormed and occupied a building, with protest leaders insisting that they “will not be moved unless by force.” This led to 109 arrests — many of whom were not even students, but outside activists — as police raided the campus. And just yesterday Columbia, citing security concerns, announced that it was canceling its university-wide commencement ceremony in favor of “smaller-scale, school-based celebrations.”

At the University of Texas at Austin on April 24, police showed a serious lack of judgment as they attempted to disperse a crowd of protestors. More than 50 were arrested and charged with trespassing, about half of them non-students. But the campus is explicitly designated as a public forum, and at the time of the arrests the protestors were just walking around; they hadn’t set up encampments or the like. Those charges were dropped for a lack of probable cause, because you can’t arrest someone on the grounds that they might set up a tent in the wrong place. A generalized fear of disruption does not justify the suppression of speech.

The climate is chaotic and varies from campus to campus and day to day. But the fact is that some of what we're seeing on campus is the stifling of absolutely protected free speech under the First Amendment. At the University of Texas at San Antonio, for example, peaceful demonstrators reported that they were told not to chant in Arabic or use phrases like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — one of the phrases Gov. Abbott singled out in his executive order. It’s also clearly protected expression.

However, some of what’s going on is very much not free speech — like setting up encampments and occupying university buildings, which constitute civil disobedience (i.e., intentionally breaking the rules) and are therefore subject to punishment. As FIRE has recently outlined, students setting up camps on school grounds should expect disciplinary action from authorities. It is well within a college’s rights to shut down encampments, as long as they are doing so in a fair and content-neutral way, and not going after protected speech in the process. 

Importantly, though, authorities also have to be consistent in their enforcement. Serving Twizzlers and burritos to some students when they do a takeover of an administrative building — as occurred at Harvard last November— sends the message to everyone that some opinions are implicitly supported by the administration, whereas encampments of students espousing causes they felt less sympathetic towards would not be tolerated. As Princeton University professor of politics Keith Whittington wrote recently, “would they show the same grace toward students wearing MAGA hats engaged in the same behavior?”

Targeted harassment is also absolutely not free speech. Students, like Matan Goldstein at the University of Virginia, have allegedly been subjected to discriminatory harassment based on their Jewish identity in schools across the country, and that is a clear step over the line into unprotected speech.

And in the case of the outright violence we saw at UCLA last week, the shoutdowns and destruction we saw at UC Berkeley earlier this year (which included shattered windows and alleged assault), and the assaults on students and professors on campuses across the country since October 7 — not only is it not free speech, it’s behavior that should get you expelled.

Before the mayhem of the last few weeks, I and my other colleagues at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression had commented that 2023 was the worst year on record for campus deplatforming and 2024 is on track to beat it. In fact, the data consistently shows campus free speech was in peril in 2018, and it has only gotten worse since then. Moreover, the vast majority of these issues have primarily and increasingly come from the left since 2018.

This is no surprise, given the daunting series of political and ideological hurdles preventing dissenting students and academics from entering or succeeding in academia — a phenomenon my “Canceling of the American Mind” co-author Rikki Schlott and I call “The Conformity Gauntlet.” Ideological homogeneity, along with administrative hypocrisy and moral cowardice, have caused this anti-free speech attitude on campuses to bubble for a very long time. Since October 7, it’s come to a rolling and sometimes violent boil.

FIRE has recorded almost 90 attempts to deplatform campus speakers due to controversy over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since October 7. We’ve also witnessed nearly 70 attempts to professionally punish scholars for expressing controversial views about the conflict. More than 100 students and student groups — such as Students for Justice in Palestine in Massachusetts, Florida, and Texas — have faced sanction attempts for expression related to the conflict in the last seven months. And while we have consistently defended pro-Palestinian voices for our entire existence, FIRE must also note that pro-Palestinian protesters are responsible for every single attempted and successful disruption of campus events and deplatforming of invited speakers since October 7. These include Ian Haworth being heckled and shouted down at the University of Kentucky; Israeli physics professor Asaf Peer being rushed off campus by police at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas after his invited talk on black holes was disrupted; and Rutgers University’s own president’s Town Hall being shut down before it could even begin.

And this past Saturday, Dickinson College announced that, following pressure from pro-Palestinian faculty and students — including an an unsigned op-ed and subsequent editorial — the school was rescinding its invitation to CNN’s Michael Smerconish to receive an honorary Doctor of Public Affairs degree and deliver the commencement address to this year’s graduating class. The op-ed argued that Smerconish advocated for racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims when he wrote in his 2004 book “Flying Blind” that TSA should focus its screening efforts on people who “resemble the known terrorists.” The editorial notes that after the letter, pro-Palestinian protesters added the removal of Smerconish as one of their demands.

This is truly a shame. I am very happy to say I know Michael personally, and I have always found him to be aggressively reasonable. Few people try harder to hear from all sides of a given issue than he does. And true to form, he has written a typically thoughtful response to his disinvitation.

As we enter graduation season, we’re also seeing commencement ceremonies being canceled as a result of the turmoil on campus. In addition to the aforementioned cancellation of commencement at Columbia, the University of Southern California canceled its commencement planned for May 10 after initially canceling its pro-Palestininan valedictorian’s speech. California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt has broken its ceremony into smaller events held at multiple locations. Some protestors, like at Indiana University, are holding their own, “alternate commencement” in the middle of their encampment rather than join the official ceremony with the rest of the school. Unfortunately we can expect other cancellations — and no doubt, disruptions of ceremonies that choose to go on — to occur in the coming days.

Higher education needs reform, and now is the time

The problems we’re seeing are endemic to our institutions of higher education, and the hypocrisy and failed leadership of administrators and university presidents deserve much of the blame. Administrators have cultivated groupthink in the name of tranquility through ideological filters on hiring, promotion, and even, at times, instruction.

Not coincidentally, trust in higher education and respect for it have plummeted in recent years, while the cost has absolutely exploded. Someone attending Columbia today might expect to pay as much as $95,000 a year when including room and board. And where has this gargantuan increase in cost per student gone? It has overwhelmingly gone to the ranks of administrators and bureaucrats that have created the orthodoxy, the free speech problems, and the gross double standards in the first place. 

So what can be done? First, as Rikki Schlott and I outline in “Canceling,” donors can insist on these five things when giving money to these schools:

1. Adopt an official, written recommitment to free speech and academic freedom, such as the 2015 Chicago Statement, which ninety-eight institutions or faculty bodies have already adopted.

2. Teach students about free speech and academic freedom in orientation.

3. Dump speech codes and get rid of their bias-related incident hotlines, which allow students to report their fellow students and professors for offensive speech, often anonymously.

4. Survey students and faculty about the state of free speech on campus.

5. And, finally, defend your students and professors from cancellation early and often.

Besides this, as I’ve written before, there are many other ways donors can push for reform, including supporting alternate institutions like the University of Austin or Minerva University.

Second, schools can adopt a number of policies, such as institutional neutrality, to keep it from getting dragged into the latest political quagmires (or from seeming hypocritical when choosing not to speak on one issue despite having spoken on others). Additionally, strong commitments to principle, as University of Pennsylvania faculty members, alumni, and donors did with a proposed new constitution back in December, are moves I emphatically support.

It’s also critical that existing rules be consistently enforced. Students who engage in violence, particularly to suppress speech, must be expelled. Students who organize to shut down speakers or disrupt classes should be punished.

In admissions, schools should favor students who have taken a gap year and had some experience in the real world before setting foot on campus. Also, as Sarah Isgur pointed out, if you change your admissions criteria and ask different questions, things on campus would change dramatically:

Orientation should emphasize making arguments opposite from what you actually believe — an idea that would almost be considered blasphemous and heretical on many modern campuses, but must not be. FIRE's Free Speech Lessons for Freshman Orientation & First-Year Experience Programming are a great resource to help with this.

Administrators should always be investigated when there is a shutdown or a cancellation of a professor or a student to see if they could have done anything to keep the school's commitment to freedom of speech. And if administrators are shown to have facilitated cancellations of professors, students, illegal protests or other things that have enforced an ideological orthodoxy — the way Stanford Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach did during the shoutdown of Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan back in March 2023 — they should be fired.

Administrators who still wish to enforce double standards and orthodoxies and not to pivot to protect freedom of speech, academic freedom, and to encourage thought experimentation and devil's advocacy should also be fired. In general, there should be a large decrease in the number of administrative staff, particularly as relative to the number of full-time professors.

More classes should be co-taught by professors who actually disagree with each other, like the famous team of Green Party candidate Cornel West and Catholic conservative Robbie George at Princeton. This is great at eroding ideological certainty, which has been too common on college campuses. 

All institutions of higher education should absolutely dump all political litmus tests at every stage of the admission process and hiring process — whether those be in the form of DEI statements or whatever new rationale they come up with next. And in the meantime, nobody should donate or send their children to schools that have done poorly on FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings. The University of Pennsylvania and Harvard finished dead last, and all of the Ivy League did terribly. Instead, save your money and send your kids to places like the top-ranked Michigan Technological University, second-ranked Auburn University, a top 10 school like University of Virginia, or a perennial high performer like the University of Chicago.

But most importantly, do something. Demand change. These incredibly wealthy institutions that feel like they have a monopoly on your children's path to a secure future will not budge unless pushed. If they knew, as a hypothetical example, that Goldman Sachs was no longer hiring from the Ivy League and was instead favoring students from schools that did well on our free speech rankings, they would change their tune — and probably quite quickly. 

Perhaps most importantly, fewer jobs in the United States should require bachelor's degrees in the first place. It is an absurd and unnecessary barrier to entry that prevents brilliant and capable minds from opportunities simply because they chose a different path in life.

It took decades for American colleges and universities to become the bloated beasts they have become, and it's going to take serious reform for it to be once again worthy of the title Higher Education. We should start now.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Check out a younger version of me’s video on 5 things every alum can demand of university presidents to protect free speech and academic freedom. Universities need to do far more than this, but these would be a great start. 

Also, consider donating to FIRE to help us hold universities accountable and protect free speech everywhere.