The skeptics were wrong, Part 2

When it comes to free speech, the college kids are not alright

Last week we demonstrated that deplatforming attempts involving students have exploded over the past decade, supporting one aspect of Sean and Jonathan Haidt’s “new dynamic” hypothesis — which states that college students have become more hostile toward free speech over the past decade than in previous generations. Two weeks ago we showed that the majority of deplatforming attempts over the past decade have come from the left. These findings support the “political correctness” aspect of the “new dynamic” hypothesis — that conservative expression was more likely to be targeted on campus.

But Sean and Haidt’s hypothesis was also about how students would increasingly target conservative expression for deplatforming, and a deep dive into FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database indicates that it’s true: Students did in fact target conservative expression more often over the past decade than they did in the preceding 16 years.

Deplatforming attempts involving students are increasing — and primarily come from the left

As of March 15, FIRE has recorded 668 deplatforming attempts involving students and/or student groups since 1998. This makes up 47% of all deplatforming attempts in FIRE’s database — the largest percentage for any on- or off-campus source of deplatforming attempts.

Invited speakers are most commonly targeted for deplatforming by students, and the ones they most frequently targeted include:

• Milo Yiannopoulos (29 times), a former editor of the conservative Breitbart Magazine, who was frequently targeted for deplatforming in 2016 and 2017 during his “Dangerous Faggot” campus tour. 

• Ben Shapiro (17 times), a lawyer and political commentator who co-founded The Daily Wire, a conservative media outlet, and the host of the podcast, “The Ben Shapiro Show.”

• David Horowitz (11 times), a former adherent of “The New Left” who later rejected progressivism for neoconservatism and became a fierce critic of “political correctness” on college campuses.

• Matt Walsh (10 times), a columnist for The Daily Wire, the host of the podcast, “The Matt Walsh Show,” and the star of the documentary, “What is a Woman?”

• Ann Coulter (8 times), a conservative media pundit, author, syndicated columnist, and lawyer.

• Charles Murray (8 times), a conservative political scientist and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, co-author of “The Bell Curve,” and author of “Coming Apart.”

• Charlie Kirk (7 times), the founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, a conservative student organization.

• Mohammed el-Kurd (6 times), a Palestinian writer, poet, journalist, and organizer. 

Students have also been involved in nine deplatforming attempts that targeted performances of the play, “The Vagina Monologues,” and six that targeted screenings of the Bradley Cooper film, “American Sniper.” And while deplatforming attempts involving students that targeted “The Vagina Monologues” have rarely come from the left, some of the most recent ones have — at Cornell University in 2019, Eastern Michigan University in 2018, American University in 2016, and Mount Holyoke College in 2015. These deplatforming attempts occurred because “The Vagina Monologues” excludes the experiences of transgender women, and all of these attempts were successful.

It should be noted that there are surely some targeted speakers who by any reasonable definition would be considered part of the political left — but they are magically cast as right wing if student activists and administrators don’t like them. This approach of dismissing through name-calling is something Greg and his “Canceling of the American Mind” coauthor Rikki Schlott call the “fourth great untruth”: Bad people only have bad opinions.

Of the 668 deplatforming attempts involving students, 527 of them have come from the left (79%). One-hundred-and-twenty-two of these (23%) occurred from 1998-2013 — an average of about nine per year. The other 405 (77%) have occurred since 2014 — an average of roughly 40-and-a-half per year. To be clear, this is more than quadruple the average of nine per year from 1998 through 2013.

In contrast, only 110 of the 668 deplatforming attempts involving students have come from the right (16%). Forty of these (36%) occurred from 1998-2013 — an average of two-and-a-half per year. This is less than a third of the average attempts from the left during the same time period. Since 2014, 70 deplatforming attempts (64%)  have come from the right — an average of roughly seven per year. That’s about one-quarter of the attempts involving students from the left.

Critically, the proportion of all deplatforming attempts from the left involving students has also increased significantly over the past decade (82% of all attempts) compared to 1998-2012 (72% of all attempts). Meanwhile, attempts from the right have decreased significantly (24% from 1998-2012, compared to 14% from 2013-present).

In other words, deplatforming attempts have been increasing, and have increasingly come from the left. Unfortunately, the same can also be said for disruptions that occurred once campus events began.

Student event disruptions are increasing — and they also primarily come from the left

The number of substantial event disruptions that occurred in 2016 and 2017 dwarfed those that occurred in any of the prior years in FIRE’s Campus Disinvitation Database — and almost all of these disruptions came from the left. These incidents include:

• Students at The College of William and Mary shouting down Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Virginia,  because they were upset that the ACLU has defended the free speech rights of white supremacists. 

• Students at the University of California, Irvine, disrupting a screening of “Beneath the Helmet,” a film about five Israeli soldiers, by shouting obscenities, blocking students from entering the room where the film was being shown, and trying to push open the door to take the shouting inside the room. Police escorted out all students who had attended to watch the film, and the screening was canceled.

• Students at the University of Chicago shouting down Anita Alvarez because protesters considered Alvarez, in her capacity as Cook County state's attorney (the county where UChicago is located), responsible for state violence against minorities.

• Students at the University of Pennsylvania shouting down John Brennan multiple times over his actions as CIA head, particularly because of his involvement in drone strikes as well as wars in the Middle East. Campus police removed at least six protesters, and the event’s moderator as well as the dean of Penn Law spoke up for free speech — but they were quickly drowned out by protesters, leading them to cancel the remainder of the event.

At the time of their three-part series for Heterodox Academy in 2018, Sean and Haidt compared student-led disinvitation attempts in 2016 and 2017 to the number of attempts from 2000-2014. They found that the number of student-led disinvitation attempts from the left had roughly doubled over the previous two years, and that there had also been a five-fold increase in substantial event disruptions from the left.

Things have only gotten worse since their analysis.

According to FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database, only 22 substantial event disruptions involving students occurred from 1998-2013, and 20 of these (91%) came from the left. That’s a little more than one per year. These include — as featured in the 2015 documentary “Can We Take a Joke?” — student hecklers disrupting a performance of “The Passion of the Musical” because the playwright was “racist.” The student hecklers’ tickets were paid for by the school administration, who also encouraged students to stand up and say, “I'm offended,” whenever they felt that way during the performance.

The change we saw happen in 2014 was not simply that students were suddenly not as good on free speech. It was also that students who weren’t good on free speech were entering campuses that already had administrators hostile to free speech. It is that collaboration that has created the disaster we have seen on campus — perfectly illustrated by events like the shouting down of U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan at Stanford University, which was the result of students and administrators working together to silence disfavored speech and deplatform speakers they didn’t like. 

The other two event disruptions (which amount to 9% of the total) came from the right — which resulted in disrupted and ultimately canceled speeches by journalist and author Chris Hedges at Rockford College and former Sacramento Bee publisher Janis Besler Heaphy at California State University, Sacramento. Hedges was delivering the commencement speech at Rockford when students rushed the podium and unplugged his microphone because of his opposition to the Iraq War. Hedges was then escorted off the stage by security guards. Heaphy was unable to finish her commencement speech due to heckling over comments she had made about 9/11.

Over the past decade, 86 substantial event disruptions have occurred — almost four times the 22 that occurred from 1998-2013. Nearly all of these (83, or 98%) have come from the left, including students disrupting a talk by Art Laffer in 2019 at Binghamton University only minutes after it began. Two protesters were arrested and Laffer was escorted out of the room by police after the rest of the event was canceled. 

Only three substantial event disruptions (2%) have come from the right over the past decade. The first involved television news personality and former San Francisco prosecuting attorney Kimberly Guilfoyle, along with Donald Trump Jr., who were shouted down by supporters of former President Donald Trump at UCLA in 2019 because the campus chapter of Turning Point USA — the event organizers — canceled the Q&A session. Because this disruption involved two speakers, we count it as two disruptions. The third occurred last fall at New York University and involved Mohammed el-Kurd. This is also one of the rare examples of a substantial event disruption that does not involve a speaker being shouted down. el-Kurd’s talk was held off campus after the university threatened organizers with disciplinary action, citing “security concerns” for its decision to revoke approval for the event.

Note: As described above, only five speakers experienced substantial event disruptions involving students from the right in the entire Campus Deplatforming Database — Chris Hedges in 2002, Janis Besler Heaphy in 2003, Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle in 2019, and Mohammed el-Kurd in 2023.

Attempted disruptions involving students from the left are also on the rise. From 1998-2013, FIRE recorded 39 total attempts. Thirty-two of them (82%) came from the left and the remaining seven (18%) came from the right. In contrast, over the past decade 75 attempted disruptions involving students have already occurred, with 74 of them (99%) coming from the left.

Can things get worse?

It’s important to recognize that a single shoutdown or violent response to disfavored speech is enough to make students think twice about inviting a controversial speaker to campus. Given the unprecedented tidal wave of such incidents in the last decade, there is certainly going to be a massive chilling effect — with students opting not to invite speakers that might be unpopular on their campus. And this has the terrible effect of hermetically sealing some campuses from divergent points of view.

Sadly, we still haven’t hit rock bottom. In fact, not only can things get worse on all of these metrics — they’re actively getting worse as we write this.

FIRE’s latest update to its Campus Deplatforming Database on March 15 included the following attempted disruptions — or substantial event disruptions — that occurred this year:

• An event with Representative Daniel Kurtzer was disrupted multiple times by pro-Palestinian protesters during a speech at the University of Washington, forcing the Q&A session to end early.

• Campus police at the University of Nevada, Los Vegas, escorted Asaf Peer, a physics professor at Bar Ilan University in Israel, out of his invited talk on black holes after pro-Palestininian protesters entered the room with banners and flags and began shouting him down. During the shoutdown,  campus police told Peer that they could not remove the protesters from the venue because doing so would be an infringement of the protesters free speech rights. (We’ll take this opportunity to emphasize, yet again, that the heckler’s veto is not merely “more speech” and violent protest is not merely “extreme speech.”)

• An aide to Senator Joe Manchin threw a climate advocacy group protester to the ground after the group interrupted Manchin’s talk at the Harvard Kennedy School and one of the protesters called Manchin a “sick fuck” for his ties to the fossil fuel industry. Manchin finished his remarks.

• Security at the University of Chicago’s medical school escorted pro-Palestinian protesters out of a lecture hall for attempting to disrupt a talk by the new President of the American Medical Association, Jesse Menachem Ehrenfeld. Ehrenfeld is a gay, Jewish man. 

• Student protesters affiliated with the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at the University of Kansas disrupted a talk by Gal Cohen-Solal, a survivor of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, and were escorted out of the venue by police. SJP posted on Instagram that “brave individuals at this protest even disrupted the event from its inside, shouting down the illegal settler’s hateful speech until the cowardly Zionists had the protesters detained by the police and escorted away.”

• Pro-Palestinian students at the University of Kentucky heckled and shouted down Ian Haworth, a staunch supporter of Israel in its conflict with Hamas, causing his speech to be temporarily suspended. Campus police removed protesters from the venue, telling them the talk was canceled. Haworth continued his speech and concluded his remarks as a fire alarm went off. Police then escorted Haworth and the attendees out of the venue.

• After students planned a protest of Michael Knowles’ talk, “Abortion is Not Healthcare,” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, university administrators imposed a security fee of $4,217.17 on the Young Americans for Freedom, the student organizers of the event. The security fee was rescinded after the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and the Mountain States Legal Foundation wrote the university on behalf of YAF.

For those counting at home, that’s three more substantial event disruptions (Haworth, Kurtzer and Peer) and four more attempted disruptions (Cohen-Solal, Ehrenfeld, Knowles, and Manchin) added to FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database between Feb. 29 (when we last updated the database) and March 15 of this year. All of them came from the left, and all but two of them (Manchin’s and Knowles’) featured pro-Palestinian student protesters disrupting talks by people affiliated with or supportive of Israel in its conflict with Hamas. This also includes one instance when an Israeli professor (Peer) was giving a lecture about black holes — which has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Of the 45 deplatforming attempts that FIRE has already recorded this year, 22 of them are either attempted disruptions (15) or substantial event disruptions (7), and 18 of these disruptions have involved students — including six of the seven substantial event disruptions.

This, to put it simply, is madness.

When these incidents involve students, colleges and universities cannot allow this kind of behavior to go unpunished. They need to actively defend freedom of speech from the growing number of bullies now actively promoting intolerance and censorship on campus.

At the same time, college and university administrators need to resist the urge to cancel events — like the president of Montclair State University did by withdrawing the university’s support for “Palestine Lives,” a fundraiser organized by the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine that was supposed to feature multiple unidentified speakers, a day before the event was scheduled to take place. The reason? The university discovered that “a newly-formed outside organization, called New Jersey Students for Justice in Palestine, is now the host,” and that the group’s mission statement included an “explicit call to eliminate Zionism on our campuses and in our communities” that “goes well beyond advocacy for the Palestinian people.”

As FIRE has written before, our only way to turn these alarming numbers and terrible trends around is by recommitting to free speech principles on campus in both policy and practice, staying true to the college’s mission of pursuing knowledge, an emphasis on institutional neutrality, centering free speech in both hiring and admissions, prohibiting and staunchly disciplining disruptive and violent conduct, teaching a scholarly mindset from the start, eliminating political litmus tests, cutting administrative bloat, and continuing to collect data on the campus climate. 

Greg has also recommended five ways university presidents can prove their commitment to free speech, and last fall, he published a National Review article titled, “How Donors Can Help Fix Our Broken Campuses.” He has also written “More big ideas for reforming higher ed” right here on ERI.

FIRE will always be there to advocate for these reforms, and will continue to collect data like what we’ve shared here to aid in that effort. We simply cannot solve a problem if we don’t understand it, and we won’t take a problem seriously unless we know its magnitude. The data is how we get there.

And speaking of data — we have even more of it. In our next installment, we’ll dig into recent surveys of college undergraduates to show how current undergraduates’ attitudes about free speech leave much to be desired. We’ll also dive into FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire Database and show how the targeting of college professors also makes the case for Sean and Jonathan Haidt’s “new dynamic” hypothesis.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Check out Greg’s recent conversation with Mike Rowe on “The Way I Heard It” about the historical reasons why many Americans are hesitant to say what they really mean, and what we can do to push back against cancel culture.