‘2024 Was the Worst Year Ever for Campus Free Speech’
“the usual suspects top the list in terms of schools with the most deplatforming attempts”
Despite all of the reporting, activism and best efforts of many people, this problem just seems to get worse.
Greg Lukianoff writes at FOX News:
2024 was the worst year ever for campus free speech. Can we make 2025 better?
Well, it happened. This year is now officially the worst year on record for free speech on our nation’s campuses.
Throughout 2024, I have been referring to research from my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which showed that 2023 was the worst recorded year for attempts at our colleges and universities to disinvite speakers from campus, cancel performances, take down art exhibits and prevent the screening of films. This is based on FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database, which has been logging these kinds of incidents since 1998.
As early as May, I knew that 2024 was going to be even worse. And on November 20, I was proven right. That day, my esteemed colleague and FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens (who collected much of the data I’m providing you with here) announced that we had reached 157 deplatforming attempts, surpassing 2023’s 156.
A month later, that number is now 164. I’m not surprised, either. This is in keeping with a rising trend of these attempts in the last half decade. In fact, one out of five cases in FIRE’s database right now represent deplatforming attempts that occurred in the last two years alone.
Of course, the usual suspects top the list in terms of schools with the most deplatforming attempts. In first place this year is Georgetown University with a whopping 43 attempts in 2024. Trailing it is Harvard with 28 attempts, and UC Berkeley with 26. Notre Dame isn’t far behind with 24. Boston College and Columbia University are tied next with 23 each.
Sadly, anyone who believes this phenomenon was exclusive to a few elite university campuses is sorely mistaken. The free speech controversies run the gamut. At Pace University, students disrupted a panel discussion called “Saving Women’s Sports” by rushing the stage and yelling at panelists.
Then there’s East Tennessee State University, where administrators added curtains and content warnings to an art exhibit and required visitors to sign a liability waiver before seeing it. Another lowlight occurred at Binghamton University where a radio interview with University of Pennsylvania professor Amy Wax was canceled 10 minutes before airtime because “the proposed interview did not meet [the] station’s goals of providing content by and for Binghamton students and community members.”
Such censorial behavior is pervasive at every level of higher education, so it isn’t surprising that faculty want to keep their heads down and not rock the boat in their classrooms, their research and their out-of-classroom speech.
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Comments
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——-
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