Supporting Students Free Expression

Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack

Excerpt: About a decade ago, I had a weird idea. At the time, I had for 13 years defended free speech and academic freedom in higher education at FIRE — then the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, now and Expression — but something began to change around 2014. There was a sudden surge in attempts to deplatform speakers, and students were arriving on campus requesting things I’d never heard of, like “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces,” and the policing of “microaggressions.”

I was developing a theory about what happened, but I wanted to talk it through with someone knowledgeable. That’s when I asked Jonathan Haidt out to lunch to discuss it. Jon is a world-renowned social psychologist and professor at New York University. We met at an Indian restaurant near his campus, and I started to lay out my thoughts. What followed was the beginning of a working relationship and friendship that continues to this day.

Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Universities today feel understandably besieged. State legislators are intervening in curricular debates, members of Congress are taking aim at university presidents, and public support for college is at historic lows. Because criticism of the university from the outside comes most intensely from the right, and professors and administrators on the inside are mostly on the left, it is natural for insiders to respond to external critics by appealing to partisan passions, summoning one another to the barricades, and attempting to repel the barbarian onslaught.

Abigail Chachkes and Thor N. Reimann
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: Concerns about campus speech are taking Harvard by storm. Given the “worst score ever,” by college free speech watchdog FIRE, Harvard’s administration has put together initiative after initiative to bolster open dialogue on campus.

While most of the dialogue around free speech on college campuses focuses on classroom culture and student groups in more overtly political protest spaces, the comedy scene has flown under the radar — despite the fact that comedy is often a means of self-expression amid times of social and political unrest.

Paula Chakravartty and Vasuki Nesiah
New York Times

Excerpt: At New York University, the spring semester began with a poetry reading. Students and faculty gathered in the atrium of Bobst Library. At that time, about twenty-six thousand Palestinians had already been killed in Israel’s horrific war on Gaza; the reading was a collective act of bearing witness.

Soon after those lines were recited, the university administration shut the reading down. Afterward, we learned that students and faculty members were called into disciplinary meetings for participating in this apparently “disruptive” act; written warnings were issued.

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley’s Blog

Excerpt: We have another successful “deplatforming” of a speaker at a university this week after Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) had to be removed from an event at the University of Georgia. This follows incidents discussed this week involving student protests at Tulane and Maryland.

Rep. Collins was invited to speak on campus by the University of Georgia Turning Point USA chapter and College Republicans. His remarks, however, were drowned out by protesters screaming profanities and insults.

Greg Lukianoff
UnHerd

Excerpt: Last week, Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin tried to give a talk about democracy at the University of Maryland. I say “tried”, because he never got to actually do it. Moments after Raskin began his remarks, pro-Palestine protesters started heckling him, shouting accusations that he was “complicit in genocide” and preventing him from proceeding with his speech.

2023 was the worst year ever for campus deplatforming attempts — and 2024 is already on track to blow it out of the water. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has already recorded 45 deplatforming attempts as of 15 March, a pace of around 200 for the year, but I suspect that it will be even higher as shout-downs have become such a popular tactic among activists.