The state of free speech on campus in 2023
From campus shout-downs to angry mobs and censorship, 2023 was a "normal" year for speech on campus, according to Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression President Greg Lukianoff. And by "normal," he means "very, very bad."
College campuses have long been hotbeds of censorious conduct, according to a major free speech advocacy group, but the turmoil of 2023 may mark a turning point.
"The situation for free speech on college campuses has been dire for a long time," Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression President Greg Lukianoff told Fox News. "I'm hopeful that this will be an opportunity for the kind of serious discussions and change that need to happen, because this situation is not sustainable."
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Lukianoff and FIRE, a free speech advocacy group, often call the current campus climate "the new Red Scare," alluding to two previous eras of rampant censorship. But he argues that McCarthyism, during which an estimated 100 professors lost their jobs for alleged Communist beliefs, was actually less severe than modern cancel culture.
About 200 professors have been fired since 2014 for offensive speech or other expressions, according to FIRE's count.
"In a very real sense, you're talking about a situation that is worse than it was in one of the most famous bad periods for academic freedom," Lukianoff said. "The weird thing with cancel culture is that ideologues are still actually claiming this isn't even happening or it's some kind of right-wing hoax or doesn't exist."
The past year saw plenty of embarrassing scholastic shout-downs, Lukianoff said. A mob of angry students chased former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines into a classroom after she spoke at San Francisco State University.
At Stanford Law School, students heckled Judge Kyle Duncan as he tried to speak to the school's Federalist Society chapter.
"Free speech is dead on most college campuses nationwide," education reporter and Point Park University student Logan Dubil told Fox News.
Riley Gaines speaks during a discussion on transgender athletes in women's sports during a National Girls and Women in Sports day event on Feb. 1, 2023, in Washington, D.C. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
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Dubil captured video in October of protesters knocking objects off a table and yelling at people attending Gaines' "Real Women's Day" rally at Penn State University.
"If higher ed wants to be taken seriously, changes must be made to the way politics and social issues are discussed and advocated for on our campuses," Dubil wrote in a message to Fox News.
One in 10 college students said they had been punished or threatened with discipline by college administrators over their speech, a recent FIRE survey found. That means nearly one and a half million students may have been targeted in total, since there were about 15.4 million undergraduate students nationwide in the fall 2021.
Furthermore, 38% of survey respondents said speech they've heard on campus is equivalent to "an act of violence."
FIRE estimates more than 1 million college students may have been disciplined or threatened with punishment for their speech. (Courtesy Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression)
Hamas' attack on Israel served as a flashpoint on many campuses with already tense speech environments. FIRE condemned the University of Southern California for relegating a Jewish economics professor to remote work after he called Hamas terrorists "murderers" who "should be killed" in front of a group of pro-Palestinian students.
On the other side, establishments like Brandeis University and the State University System of Florida moved to shut down chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine for supporting Hamas, which the United States has designated as a terrorist organization. FIRE warned this was "a dangerous — and unconstitutional — threat to free speech."
Florida quickly backed down, citing concerns of "potential personal liability" for administrators.
"It's like, ‘You don’t say?' This has been going on for quite some time."
One effect of the clampdown on pro-Palestinian students is that people on the left "who have never taken the issue of campus free speech very seriously" are now worried that people are being punished for their opinions, Lukianoff said.
"It's like, ‘You don’t say?' This has been going on for quite some time," he said. "People have not been paying enough attention to it."
Lukianoff said he's getting flak from the right because three chapters of his new book, "The Canceling of the American Mind," are devoted to conservative cancel culture. About 20 chapters focus on cancel culture from the left, he said.
"Even though we correctly point out that these problems exist on both the right and the left, we don't try to pretend that they're of equal proportion," he said. "Cancel culture is at its worst at elite higher education in the United States, which is overwhelmingly super majority left-leaning, both in terms of administrators and professors."
In a 2022 Harvard Crimson survey, more than 80% of faculty respondents described their political leanings as "liberal" or "very liberal." Just 1.5% identified as "conservative." (Fox News Digital)
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Going into 2024, Lukianoff urges people to "start thinking big about higher education reform."
"I want people who donate money to higher ed and sort of instinctively want to send their kids to Ivy League schools to wake up and realize that there's something seriously wrong there," Lukianoff said. "You shouldn't be giving your $10,000 — let alone your $10 million — to any of these incredibly rich mega-corporations."
He urged parents and students to consider FIRE's College Free Speech Rankings when choosing a university. The annual report surveys tens of thousands of students at more than 200 colleges to identify schools that support speech and open inquiry, and those that don't.
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"Now is the moment when we need to actually really be trying to fix this problem that's been getting worse for a very long time," he said.
To hear more from Lukianoff, click here.
Ramiro Vargas contributed to the accompanying video.
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