There have been 1,080 attempts to punish scholars over the past 23 years: Report

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College officials are ‘cowards’ for not enforcing free speech: Ilya Shapiro

A former law professor said university officials need to enforce their own policies after students and educators heckled a judge and stopped his remarks.

A free-speech group found that there have been over 1000 attempts to punish scholars over the past 23 years.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education released a "Scholars Under Fire" report showing that there have been 1,080 attempts to punish scholars over the past 23 years. The annual number of attempts has gone up from 4 in 2000 to 145 last year, according to the report.

The report also found that 73% of those attempts to punish scholars have resulted in some sanction, including 225 terminations. Furthermore, they report that 3/4 of the firings were untenured scholars.

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The report goes on to say show that 37% of attempts to punish faculty were initiated by undergraduate students. There were 213 sanction attempts that occurred in 2021 alone, more than in any other single year.

A general view of the buildings of the Main Quadrangle and Hoover Tower on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. (David Madison/Getty Images)

The report includes a chart that shows which topics have driven the attempts to punish scholars. Among 21 topics that FIRE lists on the chart, race is the leading issue where scholars have been subject to scrutiny when addressing it in their profession.

According to the report, some of the United States' most prestigious universities have had the highest number of sanction attempts, including Harvard University, Stanford University, University of California Los Angeles, Georgetown University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

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"It should be no surprise that several of the schools with the highest number of sanction attempts are also ranked at the bottom of FIRE’s College Free Speech Ranking," FIRE tweeted.

"Cancel culture is particularly pernicious when it targets people charged with discovering and disseminating knowledge," said FIRE Director of Faculty Outreach Komi Frey, lead author of the report. 

College students sitting at rows of desks in classroom.  (Elina Shirazi)

"Vocal, dogmatic minorities on the left and the right are trying to restrict the range of acceptable ideas in institutions of higher education, and this should alarm us all. You do not need to agree with a scholar’s teaching, research, or extramural speech to recognize that censorship is not the answer." 

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Fox News Digital has previously reported on college professors speaking out against higher education for violating free speech rights.

Ilya Shapiro, a former Georgetown University law professor, told Fox News Digital that university officials need to reprimand students and administrators who violate free speech policies and stop caving to the "woke mob."

"University officials … are spineless cowards unwilling to enforce their own rules when they're violated by students, much less administrators," Shapiro said.

Shapiro was commenting on Trump-appointed Judge Kyle Duncan of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals who was being heckled during a speech. 

Fox News' Megan Myers contributed to this report.