The Campus Deplatforming Hall of Fame

Inductees include Milo, Ben Shapiro, and The Vagina Monologues

A few weeks ago it happened — 2024 eclipsed 2023 as the year with the most deplatforming attempts according to FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database. What’s even more alarming is that one-fifth of all the entries in FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database, which goes back to 1998, have occurred over the past two years.

Some of the more recent controversies include the disruption of a panel discussion at Pace University when students and faculty began yelling at the panelists during the Q&A. The panelists were escorted out by security after a faculty member allegedly rushed the stage.

They also include East Tennessee State adding curtains and content warnings to an art exhibit and requiring visitors to sign a liability waiver before entering. Why? Because a Republican member of Congress, multiple Republican state senators, members of the general public, and students at the university objected to three pieces of art featured in the exhibit. One piece depicts Speaker of the House Mike Johnson in front of a swastika morphing into a cross. Another is a collage that features "violent" messages from members of the alt-right. The third is an American flag made from a Ku Klux Klan hood.

There’s also the cancellation of a radio interview with University of Pennsylvania professor Amy Wax at Binghamton University 10 minutes before Wax and the hosts were supposed to go on air because "the proposed interview did not meet [the] station’s goals of providing content by and for Binghamton students and community members.”

Pace, East Tennessee, Binghamton. So much for this phenomenon being isolated to a couple of high-profile elite campuses.

To mark this momentous occasion — 164 deplatforming attempts this year, or one about every other day — I am pleased to introduce the first ever members of the Campus Deplatforming Hall of Fame.

I’ve set up clear criteria for entry. Schools with 20 or more deplatforming attempts and speakers and performances targeted by 10 or more deplatforming attempts since 1998 are inducted into the Campus Deplatforming Hall of Fame.

Schools in the Campus Deplatforming Hall of Fame

Nine schools make up the inaugural class of 2024:

Thanks to an attempted disruption of a campus event this year featuring Allen West, Saint Louis just made the cut! The same can be said of UCLA, who earlier this year locked the members of the campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom out of the venue requested for an event featuring Robert Spencer, forcing the event’s cancellation. (UCLA disputes YAF’s account and insists the event took place.)

It is Georgetown, however, not Harvard, Columbia or even Berkeley, that can currently claim to be the GOAT of deplatforming attempts among schools — with a whopping 43, 15 more than its closest competition (yes, that’s Harvard).

A handful of schools did not miss the cut by much. These honorable mentions include Barnard College (18), the College of the Holy Cross (18), the University of Pennsylvania (18), Loyola University of Chicago (17), and the University of Southern California (16).

Speakers and Performances in the Campus Deplatforming Hall of Fame

Seven speakers and one performance round out the inaugural class of 2024:

The Vagina Monologues, thanks to the Cardinal Newman Society, a nonprofit activist organization that works to promote and defend faithful Catholic education, is the Wayne Gretzky, the GOAT, of the Campus Deplatforming Database — the 231 times it has been targeted for deplatforming is a record that will likely never be broken. As we previously noted, 185 of these deplatforming attempts led by the Cardinal Newman Society occurred between 1998 and 2012. However, in true GOAT fashion, The Vagina Monologues has not only faced deplatforming attempts for its “vulgar” content that “has no academic or social value to students at a Catholic college,” but also because “it offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman,” excluding the experiences of transgender women. That’s right. Attempts to cancel The Vagina Monologues come from both the right and the left.

When it comes to speakers, Milo takes the top spot, having undergone 37 deplatforming attempts. Many of those 37 attempts occurred during his “Dangerous Faggot” tour in 2016 and 2017. In that time period Milo was slapped on stage by students at DePaul University, had protesters block the entrance to an event at the University of California, Davis, and was scheduled to appear at the University of California, Berkeley, the night the “Battle of Berkeley” erupted, which forced the cancellation of Milo’s appearance. Over the past six years however, Milo's pace has slowed to a snail’s crawl. He’s faced only two deplatforming attempts: one at Pennsylvania State University in 2021 and another at the University of South Carolina earlier this year. In both cases, he was able to speak successfully.

Milo’s closest competition is Ben Shapiro, who’s been the target of 24 deplatforming attempts. Like Milo, Shapiro peaked a while ago, from 2016 to 2018, and he might be past his prime. From 2020 to present, Ben has been the target of 5 deplatforming attempts.

The remaining speakers were targeted between 10 and 13 times.

Matt Walsh appears to have taken on Ben Shapiro’s mantle of most hated Daily Wire commentator on campus. Walsh has faced 11 deplatforming attempts since 2019, with 10 of them occurring from 2021 to 2024. Two student protesters at the University of California, Davis, also disrupted a screening of Walsh’s documentary, “What is a Woman?” by tossing a bag of manure into the room and pepper-spraying the student organizers who pursued them. One of the student organizers was injured.

Like Walsh, Charlie Kirk has also faced ire on campus over the past few years. Kirk has faced 10 deplatforming attempts since 2021 — seven of which occurred these past two years.

Ann Coulter, the only female speaker in the Campus Deplatforming Hall of Fame so far, has faced 11 deplatforming attempts going back to 2001 when she was heckled throughout her speech at her alma mater, Cornell University, had oranges thrown on the stage, and had an audience member lunge at her. Coulter did not finish her speech. Coulter has faced two more deplatforming attempts at her alma mater. In 2022, her speech at Cornell’s law school also ended early after students continuously yelled over her and blew whistles to drown her out. This year faculty called on the university to disinvite Coulter from campus. Coulter spoke with just one interruption, but a faculty member was arrested during the Q&A session for disorderly behavior.

James Martin, known as the “rainbow priest” because of his views on abortion, homosexuality and transgender rights, also owes his spot in the hall of fame to the Cardinal Newman Society, as they frequently object to his appearances at Catholic colleges and universities.

Honorable mentions for speakers include William Ayers (9 attempts), Charles Murray (9), and Michael Knowles (8).

With the year winding down, we may need to wait until next year for any new inductees.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

As the fall semester comes to a close and students head home for winter break, be sure to check out FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings, the result of the largest survey of student sentiments on free speech in higher ed ever collected (and which wouldn’t be possible without the dogged work of Sean and FIRE’s research department!).

The rankings have proven to be quite possibly FIRE’s most effective tool for using market forces to enact tangible change in the academic landscape. The annual project (which still needs funding!) has led countless schools to reach out to FIRE to request our help improving the free speech climate on their campus, and, recently, the rankings were even touted by incoming head of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattatcharya, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.