An overwhelming majority of US universities and colleges impose regulations on students’ free speech, a new report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has found.
The fact that most US college students attend either a public school that is bound by the First Amendment or a private school that commits in writing to following free speech principles might seem to preclude the possibility of free speech and academic freedom coming under threat. But as FIRE’s annual Spotlight on Speech Codes 2024 report shows, most schools in fact maintain policies that place those principles at risk.
Of the 489 schools included in FIRE’s database, one in five (20%) gained the worst possible ranking – an overall “red light” – for maintaining free speech policies that “clearly and substantially restrict free speech”.
According to FIRE, red light institutions “maintain at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech or bars public access to its speech-related policies by requiring a university login and password for access”.
The percentage of schools earning an overall red-light rating increased for the second time in a row, reversing a 15-year trend in which the percentage decreased.
In this year’s report, an additional eight schools (1.6%) received a “warning” rating for not formally promising students any free speech rights at all.
“Yellow light” ratings were given to 320 (65.4%) colleges, for maintaining policies that impose vague regulations on expression “that could too easily be applied to suppress protected speech”.
Only 63 schools in the US (12.9%) gained a “green light” for maintaining what FIRE regards as policies “that do not seriously imperil free expression”.
One of the problems FIRE identifies is that although ‘harassment’ is not protected by the First Amendment, “schools typically define harassment and bullying so broadly that their policies encompass protected speech”.
Something similar has been happening in UK higher education, as many universities have adopted bullying and harassment policies that misapply equalities law. The result has been policies that are all too easily weaponised by activist employees looking to ‘go after’ staff and students who express lawful views that dissent from ‘woke’ orthodoxy, particularly around gender identity theory.
To take just one example, a recent report by the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) found that under definitions of transphobia included in nine university policies on LGBT+ rights, academics who believe that transgender women are not women must be considered ‘transphobic’.
“By defining gender-critical beliefs as transphobia, a university takes the view that gender-critical beliefs are wrong,” the report warned, before adding: “The existence of such an official point of view must restrict freedom of thought among academics… [and makes it] next to impossible for academics and students in those universities to freely explore and debate gender-critical ideas.”
The report also found that a further eight UK universities have transgender and equalities related policies containing provisions that allow them to remove “transphobic propaganda” – including “written materials, graffiti, music and speeches” – from their premises. The fact that ‘transphobia’ is never defined in any of these policies creates what the report describes as “a menacing vagueness, which could be exploited to censor gender critical academics and students”.
You only have to glance through the FSU’s case files to find many other examples where university policies that misapplied equalities legislation were used to curtail academic freedom of speech and thereby exert a chilling effect on other staff and students.
