If you think the status of free expression on college campuses is bad, you are wrong. It’s not just bad, it’s absolutely atrocious.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, released a report this week that 6.4 million college students, meaning students at 89% of all college campuses, face “policies that restrict — or could too easily be applied to restrict — student expression.” One-fourth of all colleges have what FIRE calls a “red light” situation, meaning the colleges enforce speech codes that “clearly and substantially restrict freedom of speech.”
Another 64% fall in the “yellow light” category with worrisome, but not horrendous, speech restrictions, while only 11% are “green-lighted” for permitting free speech.
“Many college administrators are scrubbing the most egregious policies from the books, but they’re increasingly crafting subtler policies that still limit student expression,” said FIRE Senior Program Officer Laura Beltz, the lead author of the study, in the organization’s press release. “Yellow light policies aren’t good enough — they still restrict protected speech. Colleges must go green or go back to the drawing board.”
The illegitimate restrictions on free expression take many forms. Numerous colleges, for example, rightly intend to forbid speech of a “threatening” nature (a constitutionally acceptable prohibition) but define “threat” so broadly that it encompasses not just direct physical intimidation but also indirect or vague statements that merely make some listeners feel uncomfortable. Rules forbidding violent incitement, meanwhile, often turn that concept on its head, banning not just expression that urges others to commit violence, but also speech that “triggers” opponents to violence, even when the speaker had no such intention.
And, of course, colleges are particularly prone to overregulate romantic interactions, defining harassment up (using Charles Krauthammer’s concept, in a rejoinder to Daniel Patrick Moynihan) in such a way that even “verbal comments of a suggestive nature” or “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” even if nonverbal or nonphysical, are punishable. Not addressed by these schools is how a student is supposed to know his hints are welcome until they are rebuffed.
FIRE says colleges also go too far in trying to ward off obscenity, bullying, incivility, “hate speech,” and other transgressions that may be undesirable but that the schools define too broadly.
The only thing missing from FIRE’s report are concrete examples not just of the written policies but of specific instances wherein they unduly restricted speech. The rest of FIRE’s website, however, is replete with such examples.
Amid all this disturbing information about violations of the First Amendment or its principles, FIRE does report the good news that the trend is mildly in the right direction. As bad as the results are, they are less bad than they were a few years ago. This is actually the 12th year in a row that the percentage of “red light” schools has declined, albeit at only a slow and incremental pace. Likewise, the number of “green light” schools has increased and now tops 10% for the first time. Fifty colleges, up from last year’s 42, have adopted written policies explicitly conducive to free speech.
If other words, FIRE’s work, along with the concerted efforts of other organizations and writers to highlight overrestrictive speech codes, is having a salutary effect. Sunlight, as usual, disinfects.
This is a battle that has been fought for at least 30 years, and it will continue to need fighting for quite a long time. Academicians keep thinking, wrongly, that their job is to protect students from unpleasantness rather than to enable them to overcome it. Thank goodness there’s FIRE to burn those attitudes away.
