After more silence from NYU, FIRE files accreditor complaint

UPDATED (Dec. 9, 2024): On Oct. 25, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education told FIRE that it had forwarded our complaint to NYU to request a response to our allegations that the university had been flagrantly violating the expressive rights of students and faculty. On Dec. 4, the commission notified FIRE that NYU had “satisfactorily demonstrated compliance” with its standards for accreditation, and MSCHE “considers this matter closed.” Per commission policy, MSCHE did not share the institutional responses with FIRE. Despite this development, we will continue to hold NYU publicly accountable for its violations of faculty and student expressive rights. We will keep readers updated.

When your free speech rights are violated, FIRE doesn’t back down. 

After several missives and a final warning to the university, FIRE is filing an accreditor complaint against New York University for flagrantly violating the expressive rights of its students and faculty. NYU has had multiple chances to defend its record, either publicly or privately, but has refused. 

The university’s official Student Conduct Policy claims that the university prizes free inquiry, free expression, and free association, and boasts that NYU “is a community where the means of seeking to establish truth are open discussion and free discourse.” The university also claims that academic freedom “is essential to the free search for truth and its free expression.” 

But it has repeatedly failed to live up to this standard. So it’s time to bring in the big guns.

When a school like NYU simply ignores those standards, the legitimacy of the whole system is threatened.

Our complaint urges NYU’s accreditor, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, to examine the university’s violations of the commission’s requirement that accredited institutions maintain “a commitment to academic freedom, intellectual freedom, [and] freedom of expression.”

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Censoring political speech — as NYU has repeatedly done over the past year, especially targeting pro-Palestinian speech — is a clear breach of this commitment. Our complaint explains: 

NYU’s investigations and punishments have restricted, and continue to restrict, the ability of students and faculty to enjoy its promises of academic freedom, intellectual freedom, and freedom of expression. Accrediting agencies, including this Commission, are often a last line of defense in protecting faculty and student freedom of expression at institutions of higher education. Faculty, particularly those without tenure protections, face an unbalanced power dynamic when private institutions that promise free expression fail to live up to those commitments when controversies arise. And the limited time students have at a university limits their ability to organize for long-term change without administrative support.

NYU finished a putrid 249 out of 251 schools in FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings. This poor ranking makes sense: over the past year, FIRE has had to call the university’s attention to repeated instances of censorship. Our warnings were met with silence, so we’re taking it to the accreditor. Our complaint details NYU’s investigation of a professor for his comments about the severity of Hamas’s attacks in Israel, its investigation of a student who sent an email blaming Israel for the October 7 attacks, as well as its mandated “thought reform” discipline for arrested student protesters, among other abuses. 

Many likely found the speech NYU chose to punish offensive. But if NYU is going to publicly commit to free expression and allow for “debate and dissent,” then it has to protect political speech — even offensive political speech. The university’s free speech promises are meaningless if it fails to protect such offensive speech. After all, offense is highly subjective. If universities decide to start punishing speech they feel is offensive, it won’t be long until student protest and faculty extramural speech is targeted even more severely than it is now.

The function of an accreditor is to ensure that academic standards are followed so that the public can have confidence in our higher education institutions. When a school like NYU simply ignores those standards, the legitimacy of the whole system is threatened. FIRE is urging Middle States to step up and take a hard look at NYU’s actions. We'll keep readers updated.