A year in campus speech controversies — What does the data reveal?

What topics do you think are difficult to discuss on campus?

If you asked that question to four students before a football game between Oklahoma State and Kansas State on Oct. 6 last year, odds are one of them would have said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

If you asked the same four students the same question before the kickoff of Missouri versus Texas A&M on Oct. 6 this year, it’s likely at least two of them would say this. 

If these students attended a school like Columbia, George Washington, or Tulane, the number would probably be three. 

Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and Israel’s military response, have convulsed colleges across the country. On many campuses, students’ confidence and trust in their school’s administration to defend freedom of speech has plummeted. This decline in trust is most pronounced on campuses where students were arrested for establishing an encampment. Sanctions of scholars, students, and student groups, as well as deplatforming attempts — which FIRE defines as attempts to get an invited speaker or performance canceled — have become routine. In fact, they now occur multiple times a week, and most concern expression related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

USC canceling valedictorian’s commencement speech looks like calculated censorship

News

The university’s move, citing vague ‘safety concerns’ appears designed to placate critics of the student’s Israel criticism.

Read More

Here are some noteworthy examples:

• Administrators at the University of Southern California canceled valedictorian Asna Tabassum’s commencement speech because of “substantial risks relating to security and disruption at commencement.” Yet, there is no evidence that the university received any threats or took any steps to secure the event short of canceling Tabassum’s speech. The cancellation of the speech appears to have been motivated by Tabassum’s social media posts, which were critical of Israel. Following student and faculty backlash over the decision, administrators also decided to revoke the invitations from all of the commencement speakers, including Billie Jean King. 
• Multiple schools revoked their invitations to Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, following objections from students and the campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine. They demanded that the school disinvite Greenfield because she had recently vetoed three UN resolutions calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
• Seth Crosby, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, alleges that he was fired over an exchange he had on X with E. Michael Jones, an author and former professor at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana. Jones posted that “Israel is engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,” to which Crosby replied by saying it was a “much-needed cleansing, yes, but not an ethnic one. Israel is not targeting humans.”
• After receiving a complaint from an anonymous individual attending a public “Open Studios” event, campus police at Brooklyn College required art student Morgan Patten to remove two signs from her studio door saying “Free Palestine” and “Zionism is fascism,” because school policy does not allow posters on doors. The signs had been posted on the door for a month without incident, and the officers did not ask any of the other art students to remove signs or posters from their doors.

Since Oct. 7, FIRE has recorded 138 deplatforming attempts targeting expression about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That’s about three a week, or one every other day. Worse, of the roughly three deplatforming attempts that occur each week, one of them is likely to either be a failed attempt to shout down a speaker, which FIRE considers indicative of a poor speech climate, or a successful one that forces the event to end early. We’ve also recorded 77 attempts to sanction scholars for expression about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and 11 terminations. 

In other words, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has consumed the political discourse on college campuses, and every single week — somewhere in the country — students or faculty are facing retaliation for their beliefs.

FIRE is hopeful that the recent trend of colleges and universities adopting institutional neutrality indicates that administrators intend to show more backbone in response to cancellation demands.

But what is even more alarming is the number of recorded attempts to sanction students and student groups for expression regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: 167. That is four attempts to sanction students a week, and what’s worse is that half of these attempts succeed. This is likely just the tip of the iceberg, because our student data only reflect the publicly reported incidents that we’ve been able to review up to June 15, 2024. We are aware of many more since then, but their sheer number, in combination with sometimes limited information and/or lengthy adjudication processes, means that we are often one step behind when it comes to keeping up with the outcomes of these student sanction attempts.

This means that it is likely that some kind of expression regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was sanctioned on a college campus almost every single day in the past year.

Although administrators are often the ones leveling the sanctions, the problem is not isolated to them. The reality is that administrators are often meekly responding to the demands of others — students, faculty, alumni, activist organizations, politicians, donors — when they revoke a speaker’s invitation to campus, suspend a professor, or revoke recognition of a student group. 

College Protests and the First Amendment

Issue Pages

What are your free speech rights when there is a college protest on campus? FIRE explains your civil liberties on campus during times of protest.

Read More

FIRE is hopeful that the recent trend of colleges and universities adopting institutional neutrality indicates that administrators intend to show more backbone in response to cancellation demands. For example, after ranking poorly in last year’s College Free Speech Rankings, the University of South Carolina endorsed the Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression at the University of Chicago, better known as the “Chicago Statement,” and worked with FIRE’s Policy Reform team to revise its speech policies. This earned it a “green light” rating, which means there are no policies on the university’s books that seriously imperil student speech. Then a few weeks ago, when students, alumni, local politicians, and the NAACP all pressured South Carolina to cancel a roast of Kamala Harris featuring Gavin McInnes and Milo Yiannopolous, the university refused and the event occurred without incident. 

This is the way, and we hope more universities begin to follow suit.