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Well, it happened. This year is now officially the worst year on record freedom of speech on our nation’s campuses.
During 2024, I referred to the research of my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which showed that 2023 was the worst year on record for attempts by our colleges and universities to turn speakers off campus, cancel plays, tear down art exhibits, and prevent movies from showing. This is based on FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming database, which has been recording such incidents since 1998.
I already knew in May that 2024 would be even worse. And on November 20, it turned out that I was right. On that day, my esteemed colleague and FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens (who collected much of the data I provide you 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 line with the increasing trend of these attempts in the last half decade. In fact, one in five cases in FIRE’s database currently represent deplatforming attempts that have occurred in the last two years alone.
Georgetown University had the most deplatforming attempts of any college in 2024. FILE: A statue of John Carroll, the school’s founder, on the Georgetown campus, Washington, DC. (Photo credit: Robert Knopes/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Of course, the usual suspects top the list in terms of schools with most deplatforming attempts. In first place this year is Georgetown University with a whopping 43 attempts in 2024. It is followed by Harvard with 28 attempts and UC Berkeley with 26. Notre Dame is not far behind with 24. Boston College and Columbia University follow next with 23 each.
Unfortunately, anyone who believes that this phenomenon was exclusive to a few elite university campuses is sorely mistaken. Controversies about free speech are widespread. At Pace University, students interrupted a panel discussion called “Saving Women’s Sports” by rushing the stage and yelling at the 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 disclaimer before seeing it. Another bad light occurred at Binghamton University where a radio interview with University of Pennsylvania professor Amy Wax was canceled 10 minutes before airing because “the proposed interview did not satisfy [the] the station’s goals are to provide content for Binghamton students and community members.”
Such censorious behavior is rampant at all levels of higher education, so it’s no surprise that professors want to keep their heads down and not rock the boat in their classrooms, their research, and their speech outside of the classroom.
In 2024, FIRE announced the results the largest college research on freedom of speech ever carried out. While the results probably won’t shock you given how free speech has been on campus for the past decade, they should absolutely enrage you. The study asked 6,269 faculty members at 55 major colleges and universities a variety of questions about how comfortable they are with expressing themselves on campus. Result? We found that self-censorship on American campuses is currently four times worse than it was at the height of the McCarthy era.
That’s not an exaggeration. In a major survey conducted by sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens in 1954, at the height of McCarthyism, 9% of social scientists (who the researchers suspected were most likely self-censoring) claimed to have suppressed their own expression for fear of causing controversy. In FIRE’s 2024 survey, the number of teachers who said the same was 35%.
It gets worse. Fourteen percent of faculty reported disciplinary action or threats of disciplinary action for teaching, research, academic speaking, or other off-campus speech. Twenty-seven percent felt they could not speak freely for fear of how students, administrators, or other faculty would react. Forty percent are worried about damaging their reputation because someone misunderstood something they said or did, and 23 percent are worried about losing their job because of it.
If you can believe it, it gets even worse than that. Our survey was anonymous, but even the mask of anonymity did not diminish some faculty’s concerns about speaking out. Despite the fact that we did not collect identifying information, some respondents did specifically request that we keep certain information they shared private. Others have asked us to direct all correspondence to a private personal email instead of their college addresses. Some refused to answer our survey at all, although their names and affiliations did not want to be published.
FILE: People march outside hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman’s office to protest his campaign against diversity, equality and inclusion and attacks on former Harvard University president Claudine Gay in New York, US, January 4, 2024. (REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton)
I know I’ve been telling fortunes here, but I wouldn’t be doing the work I do if I didn’t think there was hope for the future. In fact, there have been some promising developments this year.
Schools like MIT, Harvard, UMass Boston, Ohio State, Syracuse University, and others have begun rejecting political litmus tests in the form of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements. Many other schools, including some of those I have just named, have also committed to a policy of institutional neutrality consistent with the Chicago Declaration’s emphasis on the importance of free speech at institutions of higher education.
Scrappy young startups like the University of Austin have given our legacy institutions a much-needed wake-up call that they are not invincible. Both the media and the public have become much more comfortable exposing and criticizing many of the issues plaguing higher education, as evidenced by The New York Times’ report on how the University of Michigan is rethinking its DEI program.
So, yes, 2024 was a terrible year for free speech on America’s college campuses — the worst in recent memory, in fact. But 2025 is still ahead of us, and the record of 2024 is one that we should try very hard not to break. Contrary to what it might seem, I do not enjoy reporting all these terrible facts. Frankly, I wish FIRE had to go out. It is doubtful that this will happen in 2025, but we can certainly push further in that direction.
