FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings, Surprise! lawsuit, & more!

Bringing you the latest free speech news (9/8/24)

Stories of the week

• Free speech is in trouble: higher education needs higher standards (The Hill) by me

If the only problem with higher education today were that it is too expensive and too bureaucratized, that would surely be enough to prompt calls for major reform. But given the chilly atmosphere for freedom of speech, the lack of viewpoint diversity among professors, and the omnipresent incentives — both formal and informal — encouraging professors toward academic conclusions that are popular among the activist class in higher education, the fundamental function of the academy as a reliable producer of useful knowledge is in jeopardy. 

• Harvard, Columbia rank worst for free speech in new analysis (Axios)  by April Rubin

What they're saying: "More people should be essentially voting with their feet and choosing to send their kids to schools that rank really well on the ranking and not even apply to the ones that don't," Lukianoff said, "A lot of the schools that did the worst are some of the wealthiest educational institutions that have ever existed. You have to send them very strong signals that their reputations is really being harmed by their inability to stand up for free speech and academic freedom."

This week in FIRE’s blog

• TAKE ACTION: Tell Columbia its “Abysmal” speech climate is unacceptable

Tell Columbia to cultivate a better climate for free expression by realigning itself with its own promises to protect free speech, revising its problematic speech codes, and supporting students and faculty when they become embroiled in free speech controversies. Only then can Columbia bounce back from this year’s ranking. 

• Columbia, NYU join Harvard at bottom of 2025 College Free Speech Rankings by

  Sean Stevens

• 2025 College Free Speech Rankings expose threats to First Amendment rights on campus 

• University of Dayton retracts free speech promise, ignores police retaliation by Dominic Coletti

• Columnist and commentator Liz Peek joins FIRE’s Advisory Council

• Protesting, postering, or planning a campus event? Your college’s policies might have just changed by William Harris

• Meta’s Oversight Board rightly rejects outright ban on phrase, ‘From the river to the sea’ by

  Aaron Terr

• The Justice Department’s new social media policies look promising for free speech by

  Angel Eduardo

• LAWSUIT: Arizona mom sues city after arrest for criticizing government lawyer’s pay 

“I wanted to teach my children the importance of standing up for their rights and doing what is right — now I’m teaching that lesson to the city,” said Massie. “It’s important to fight back to show all of my children that the First Amendment is more powerful than the whims of any government official.”

This week in ERI

• Five takeaways from FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings by me

International free speech stories of the week

• Turkish court gives woman suspended sentence for criticizing Instagram ban (Turkish Minute)

• Gao Zhen, Artist Who Critiqued the Cultural Revolution, Is Detained in China (NYT) by Yan Zhuang & Zixu Wang

• VPN demand surges in Brazil despite legal threat to fine users nearly $9,000 a day for using workarounds to access X (Business Insider) by Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• X Corp. v. Bonta

Good correction by the Ninth Circuit this week holding a preliminary injunction should have entered against a California law requiring large social media companies to report their content-moderation policies and practices semiannually to the state AG in six state-targeted areas—hate speech/racism, extremism/radicalization, disinformation/misinformation, harassment, foreign political interference, and controlled substances—and directing the lower court to preliminarily enjoin that reporting obligation, and to see if they are severable from the rest of the law and which, if any, of the law’s other reporting and related provisions should also be enjoined.  The appellate panel held a facial First Amendment challenge lied because all aspects of the reporting requirement, in every application to covered social media, raise the same constitutional concerns, thus bypassing the Moody issue. It then held the trial court erred in finding X unlikely to succeed on its claims, given the reporting requirement compels non-commercial speech, and is thus subject to review as a content-based regulation. The court noted reporting would require platforms to convey their policy views on intensely debated and politically fraught topics, rejecting the state’s suggestion that this amounts to “only a transparency measure,” then held the mere fact that a platform’s beliefs appear in terms of service does not make them commercial speech. From there, it was relatively easy for the court to succinctly conclude the law is not narrowly tailored to serve California’s purported goal of social media transparency, and that it thus fails strict scrutiny (a point the state did not contest) – which dovetails with the showing in FIRE’s amicus brief that the trial court had failed to consider a variety of First Amendment problems with the law.

The video that made my 2024

I still have to pinch myself to make sure I'm not dreaming whenever I think about the time I got to interview one of my all-time comedy heroes, the great John Cleese.