Campus Attacks on Free Speech
How much is freedom of speech on campus under attack?
Here I’m referring specifically to the freedom for someone affiliated with the university to invite a speaker to give a talk on campus. This freedom can be curtailed by an administrator blocking a group from inviting someone due to their political views, or by people exercising the “heckler’s veto” and shouting over the speaker so s/he can’t be heard, or (in the most extreme case) physically attacking the audience or the speaker. Curtailment also includes cancelling an event because it might draw an attack from opponents of the speaker, which would be punishing the speaker for the sins of their antagonists.
I’m not talking about people peacefully protesting the speaker while allowing the event to proceed, saying that it was wrong to invite the speaker, or insulting the group that made the invitation. I’m not talking about blocking speakers who themselves are likely to incite violence.
For TLDR answer to my question, see bottom of article.
Disinvitation Database
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) maintains a Disinvitation Database of free speech violations on campus. As of today, it includes almost 550 incidents since 1998. Figure 1 displays all the incidents in the 15 months since January 2022. The chart separates incidents based on characteristics recorded in the database: the politics of the people calling for the disinvitation (broadly speaking, “from the right” and “from the left”) and whether the opponents were successful, partly successful, or unsuccessful in shutting down the event.
In almost all the “partly successful” cases, the talk was not completely blocked, but was interrupted by protesters. This category ranged from speakers barely able to talk above the shouting, to much more mild protests which but allowed the talk to continue.
While individual incidents are disheartening, the key message should be how few there are. There are nearly four thousand colleges and universities in the US, each of which has many speakers on all topics every year. As Lyle Duncan, the victim of one of the most extreme incidents (at Stanford University law school), remarked, “I have never been protested like that at any other law school, I have known of other conservative judges who have spoken at Stanford without any problems, and I spoke there in 2019 without any problems.”
In the last year and a quarter, the data base lists only 17 incidents across the United States in which political opponents of speakers had any success in blocking them.
Incidents That Weren’t?
FIRE’s database includes a category that is not clearly a free speech violation: voluntary disinvitation. Suppose a university provost is considering whom to invite to speak at commencement. Nobody would call it a free speech violation if the provost avoided picking a speaker with controversial views. Now suppose the university administrators pick someone they think is uncontroversial, students and faculty circulate a petition against the speaker, and the administrators disinvite the speaker. Is that a free speech violation? Maybe not.
Two of the successful incidents in the table fall into this category. In one, Jeh Johnson voluntarily declined an invitation from Vassar College because of opposition from the school community over his role in carrying out alleged repressive immigration policy – in the Obama administration! In the other, Devin Buckley was disinvited from giving a specialized talk at Harvard about English Romantic writers. This happened when the professor who issued the invitation discovered unrelated writings by Buckley which the professor felt were offensive to trans people.
Another speaker who was successfully blocked was Gavin McInnes, whose event at Penn State was cancelled at the last minute due to aggressive protests and counter-protests. I’m not sure this is exactly a free speech violation either. Why? Because McInnes is a founder of the Proud Boys. McInnes has promoted, and Proud Boys has committed, violence, and so McInnes falls into the small group of people who don’t actually have a right to a university platform.
Restrictions: Left Versus Right
In the last 15 months, campus attacks on free speech overwhelmingly came from the left (36 to 5), most often based on opposition to the speaker’s thoughts on race, gender, and/or abortion. As Figure 2 show, in earlier years, the division between rightist and leftist opposition to speakers was more even. The last 10 years (2013-2022), the average number of attempted disinvitations was 24.1 from the left and 7.4 from the right. For the previous 10 years, it was 10.1 from the left and 7.1 from the right. Note that Figure 2 shows all attempted disinvitations, including unsuccessful ones.
FIRE does not have a scientific method of sampling the number of incidents. For some, people report the incident, for others, FIRE is actively involved in lobbying on behalf of the targets of the incident, and in others, information may purely come from media reports that FIRE staff is aware of. The total number of incidents is probably higher than those captured in the database. On the other hand, many of the incidents – even relatively minor ones – get a fair amount of media coverage. FIRE itself is a widely cited in the media. All this suggests that the database may be capturing most of the incidents.
FIRE is a nominally non-partisan group, but it does have a reputation as having a conservative political slant. This is based on its funding from right-wing sources, including the Koch brothers, Coors, and Searle Freedom Trust, and its association with the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) through the State Policy Network. I have not read a lot of FIRE’s material outside of their statistics and case studies, but I personally don’t see a right-wing slant in their material.
However, it is possible that FIRE’s conservative reputation may deter liberals from contacting them with free speech complaints. This reporting bias, and/or a bias on FIRE’s part, could possibly make FIRE underestimate the number of incidents on the right.
How much is freedom of speech on campus under attack?
In the last 15 months, a handful of talks on campus were successfully blocked by third parties such as administrators or student protesters, and another ten or so were substantially disrupted by hecklers. If the statistics compiled by a group called FIRE are accurate, the numbers have been stable for the last decade and have been dominated by objections from people broadly on the left, contrary to the previous decade which had a closer balance of objectors. This means that about half a percent of US colleges and universities experienced a politically-motivated restriction on speakers.
In view of the numbers, it is easy to exaggerate the extent of campus attacks on freedom of speech. But even this number of incidents, several showing virtually a mob response at prestigious universities, demands concern and criticism.
Cover photo: Noam Chomsky speaking at UCLA. I used to organize talks of Chomsky and others at MIT. I would be pretty outraged if a bunch of right wingers showed up to heckle him into silence (that never happened at any of our events, by the way). I’m outraged when it goes the other way too.