A new study shows free speech is increasingly under assault on college campuses from both right and left. The nonpartisan, nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE, surveyed 58,000 college students, asking them about campus culture when it comes to comfort expressing ideas, tolerance for speakers, disruptive conduct, administration support, openness and self-censorship.
Sean Stevens, chief research advisor for FIRE said threats to speech come from all sides.
“It’s not just left-wing faculty or students going after more conservative faculty and students for inviting Ben Shapiro to campus,” he explained. “It’s now with the federal government and whatever right-wing faculty there might be left and the students going after left-leaning speech. So now you’ve got almost everybody facing these threats.”
Six private religious institutions, including Pepperdine University in Malibu, fell into the highly intolerant “warning” category. Harvard scored the lowest, with USC, Pomona College and UC Davis not far behind. UCLA and USC fell into the middling “below average” category.
Schools struggled to uphold free-speech rights as dueling protests overtook many college campuses in 2024. Stevens said the Trump administration’s crackdown on universities and foreign students, ostensibly in the name of fighting antisemitism, has raised the stakes.
“There’s a much bigger cause for concern, because now it’s also coming from the government,” he continued. “So, faculty really need to step up. Because students are rightfully concerned that if they say the wrong thing, that the hammer might come down on them.”
The data show that around 2020 we saw an uptick in punishments for speech and expression around the topic of police violence toward African Americans. Later, other issues took center stage, including sexual harassment, abortion rights, transgender rights and the Israel-Gaza war.
Written by Suzanne Potter.
