A professor can survive an online mob. What can change a career is what happens when a university decides to join it.

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Over the past quarter century, almost 2,000 scholars have faced sanctions over their speech, with more than 300 of these campaigns resulting in termination or forced resignation. A recent FIRE survey of more than 200 faculty members found that many scholars targeted for their speech experience lasting professional and personal consequences. Many feel betrayed by colleagues and institutions designed to protect them and resent their abandonment. This post draws on over two dozen semi-structured interviews with professors who participated in FIRE’s survey aggregating scholars’ individual sanction narratives into a larger portrait of the contemporary university.

Two initial conclusions from these interviews are clear. First, no targeted scholar emerges unscathed — professional, social, or psychological consequences appear in all interviews. Second, scholars themselves draw an important distinction between being sanctioned (internal, official) and being canceled (external, unofficial).

In only 12% of cases did an academic say their careers ultimately benefited from the targeting. But even those scholars described the experience as intensely unpleasant.

“I had all these great things happen after,” one scholar said. But, the person added, “in the middle of things, it was very stressful and disturbing and stuff.”

Another scholar said, “I think professionally, I probably gained more than I lost in the end,” adding, “the whole thing made me stronger,” but only after “a very intense psychological reaction” that included days without sleep and an inability to think about much else.

A scholar who described their sanctioning as professionally “elevating” still called it “emotionally difficult” and “a hard thing to go through,” remembering the early days as “hellish.”

For others, the professional consequences did not fade. One scholar who faced backlash after publishing an essay said that being placed on a Turning Point USA watchlist coincided with a sharp decline in speaking invitations: “What I have noticed, since I was on the list, my speaking engagements have radically dropped.”

Financial consequences were a common concern among both cancelled and sanctioned academics.

But the interviews also showed why faculty were clear to distinguish sanction from cancellation. One interviewee, asked to discuss the event that got them sanctioned, immediately objected: “I haven’t been sanctioned.” Emphasizing that they had never faced official institutional punishment, they instead described the experience as being “targeted” or “canceled.”

Another scholar who has had at least one hairy run-in with his university offered a similar definition: “I hear the word sanction as being some sort of official [disciplining].”

Sanctions are particularly virulent to intellectual expression because they make a scholar vulnerable by removing institutional safeguards and encouraging non-collegial behavior. As the target of a cancellation-cum-(failed) sanction said, “I think there was just plain underlying academic jealousy” and “just this oversized reaction,” and that colleagues seemed to hold the sentiment that they were “finally going to punish” this scholar “for everything that has built up for the last two decades.”

Reflecting during the interview, this interviewee realized other members of their department removed them from Covid-era Zoom department meetings. However, even if the scholar had noticed their exclusion at the time, who would they have turned to for help? The university issuing press releases condemning them? The vulnerability of a sanctioned scholar cannot be understated. Another academic told a story of having their teaching interrupted so an adjunct faculty member from their department could “scream” at them that they “shouldn’t even be at this university.”

Sometimes, the cause for sanction, targeting, or cancellation are sufficiently carcinogenic to free inquiry on their own. Although a cancelled professor retains their institutional protections, many institutions are ill-equipped to handle external actors. One scholar remembers:

I had the chancellor of my campus calling me, asking me, “what can we do to help you?” I just remember looking at my husband, because I had her on speakerphone. I don’t fucking know. Shouldn’t you guys know? Why are you asking the pre-tenure chick? Isn’t there a manual or something?

Levels of support differ vastly across institutions when a scholar is targeted. One academic who has faced numerous cancellation campaigns across two universities said that at their first university, “It would have been great to have reassurance by someone in a leadership power position” to say that such illiberal campaigns “will not impact you negatively, when you go up for tenure, promotion, etc.” At the scholar’s second university, “the Provost didn’t just have a meeting with me, he convened a meeting of both my entire department and [other relevant] department[s] to answer questions related to academic freedom and people being attacked.”

Whether an institution supports a cancelled scholar or not, being targeted is often more dangerous than being sanctioned. The same academic, highlighting the role of social media in cancellation, darkly described how online, “Women get rape threats, men get death threats.” Threats of physical violence are more likely to arise from cancellation primarily because of the presence of outside actors. One academic discussed hiring full-time bodyguards to protect themselves and their family during a particularly tenuous period where they were in the public eye. Even when these threats are illegitimate or mitigated, scholarly production is often chilled, one academic reveals that after cancellation they “sat on research and didn’t put anything out for a while.”

Sanction and cancellation are bad enough on their own, but a successful cancellation-cum-sanction is a beast all its own. The most vicious threats were reported by an untenured scholar whose sanctioning included their university inviting a speaker whose talk implicitly called for violence against the academic. After deactivating their social media, their husband received a:

threat in which somebody said they were going to dismember our then 3-year-old child and scatter his body parts so wide around the [area] where we live that nobody would find all the body parts. Then [they] would proceed to rape me while he was forced to watch, then decapitate me, and then finally, murder him. [His] family all lives [out of the country and at the same time] reported receiving strange messages on Facebook in a language they didn’t know.

Thankfully, nothing has ever come of these threats. However, the scholar remains a part-time adjunct.

Whereas cancellation is primarily beyond the scope of a university’s purview, at a minimum the university must not legitimate external targeting of a scholar through sanction. In one case, a single email from a random person with no affiliation to the university triggered an internal investigation of a scholar. This is incompatible with free inquiry. In contrast to cancellation, an institution is almost wholly in control of whether a scholar is sanctioned. In these cases, the ethic of institutional neutrality becomes paramount.

Institutional neutrality is a principle meant to prevent universities from taking positions on hotly contested topics. By remaining neutral, a university preempts the formation of a hierarchy of viewpoints and the seductions of becoming an echo chamber. If a university is avowedly institutionally neutral, it is much more difficult to sanction a scholar for their views. The scholar cannot diverge from the university’s position because the university has no position! As the Kalven Report elegantly put it, “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” When sanctioning a scholar over their expression or trajectory of inquiry, the university forgets itself and its purpose.

But making predictions can force you to clarify details about your views or the reasons behind them, and seeing how your predictions err can reveal blind spots in your understanding. In that spirit, here are five trends from our college free speech rankings data through 2025.

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Our spring 2026 data will be published when the 2027 Rankings are released on Sept. 8. (Yes, the 2026 data is used for the 2027 College Free Speech Rankings. Don’t shoot the messenger.) When that happens, we’ll publish an update on how these trends have progressed in 2026. What do you predict will have happened?

In 2020, 18% of students said that violence against speakers was at least rarely acceptable. By 2025, that number had nearly doubled, rising to 34%. Will this rise continue?

Unsurprisingly, support for shouting down a speaker has always been higher than support for violence. Though smaller than the increase in support for violence (after all, they can only go so much higher), shoutdowns show a similar increase, and now nearly three-quarters of students say they’re at least rarely acceptable. What will 2026 bring?

Meanwhile, tolerance for controversial speakers (i.e. willingness to allow them to speak on campus) has declined. Tolerance for left-wing speakers has declined for several years, and tolerance for right-wing speakers joined the party in 2025.

After a significant drop in student comfort in every setting we ask about from 2022 to 2023, comfort has inched back up a hair.

Following a massive rise in 2024 (presumably due to the effects of Oct. 7 — note that the data is collected in the spring each year), the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the single most difficult topic for students to discuss. (Notably, this difficulty is driven especially by liberal students at very liberal schools.) Will it remain so difficult for students to discuss in 2026?

The code, data, and codebook used to create these plots are here.

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In FIRE’s latest National Speech Index, 57% of Americans — across political lines — said the lack of ideological diversity in higher education is a “somewhat” or “very” serious problem.

Half of conservative Americans and 63% of very conservative Americans say the problem is somewhat or very serious. That is not especially surprising. Nor are the 59% of moderates who say the same. What is surprising is that half of very liberal Americans and 62% of liberal Americans agree. Just 9% of liberal Americans say the lack of ideological diversity is “not a problem at all.”

This convergence comes amid a much broader collapse of public confidence in American colleges and universities.

More and more people are acknowledging that America’s colleges and universities have some serious problems. A recent review of University: A Reckoning by Lee Bollinger, the former president of Columbia University, begins with one measure of the damage: Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen sharply over the past decade. In 2015, 57% of Americans told Gallup they were “confident,” to some degree, in higher education. By 2025, that figure had fallen to 42%. Just 35% of Americans now say attending college is “very important,” down from 70% in 2013.

FIRE’s own data paints a bleaker picture. Since 2024, FIRE has repeatedly asked Americans through NORC at the University of Chicago’s AmeriSpeak panel: “How much confidence, if any, do you have in U.S. colleges and universities?” Across those surveys, the share of Americans saying they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence has remained stagnant at around 30%.

Doubts about whether the predominance of liberal and progressive views among college faculty is even problematic have a long history. That makes the new finding notable. A substantial share of liberals now identify ideological groupthink as a problem worth taking seriously.

That doesn’t mean liberals and conservatives agree on what caused the problem or how severe it is. But it does open the door to discussions about what, if anything, can be done. Those conversations cannot happen if most of the people on one side do not even think there is a problem to be addressed, so this is encouraging.

What these data cannot explain is why very liberal and liberal Americans think a lack of ideological diversity in higher education is such a problem. It’s unlikely they suddenly realized there’s a significant gap — roughly 7 to 1 — between the number of liberal and conservative faculty in America, a fact that has been well documented since the 1960s, with some recent data putting the ratio at seven liberal faculty to every one conservative.

Furthermore, much of the panic over the state of higher education these days focuses more on the legislation and executive orders that conservative politicians are issuing at the state and federal level. Less attention is given to the dearth of conservative thought in American academic life.

The Catholic Church is a pedophilic institution. The police are just as racist as the Ku Klux Klan. Children should be able to transition without parental consent.

Should a college permit speakers who have made those statements to appear on campus? FIRE asks students that question to measure their tolerance for speakers associated with the political left. Then we give them three more statements:

Transgender people have a mental disorder. Abortion should be completely illegal. Black Lives Matter is a hate group.

Those statements measure tolerance for speakers associated with the political right.

The results reveal a disturbing trend. The ideological tolerance gap on campus is shrinking, but not because students are becoming more open-minded. Rather, it appears they are becoming less tolerant across the board.

Speaker tolerance matters because it’s foundational to a university’s purpose. A central premise of higher education is that students will encounter a range of ideas, including ideas that conflict with their deepest convictions. By confronting unfamiliar, offensive, or even repugnant arguments, students must test their assumptions, sharpen their reasoning, and learn to defend or revise their beliefs.

If students are never challenged by being exposed to offensive views, higher education becomes an exercise in affirmation rather than inquiry.

Five years of data from FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings Survey show that the gap between tolerance for left- and right-wing speakers has narrowed substantially — from about 23 percentage points in 2021 to roughly eight in 2025.

At first glance, that might look encouraging. Perhaps students are moving toward a shared commitment to hearing both sides.

They aren’t.

Tolerance for right-wing speakers has remained consistently low, generally ranging from the high 20s to the high 30s. Tolerance for left-wing speakers, meanwhile, peaked at about 60% in 2022 before falling to roughly 41% in 2025.

That decline is enough to pull down the overall average. Combined tolerance for left- and right-wing speakers peaked at roughly 46% to 47% in 2022 and 2023. It has fallen since then, reaching about 37% in 2025 — the lowest level in the five years examined.

Party identification reveals a predictable pattern: Strong partisans on both sides are less tolerant of speakers associated with the opposing side.

But the size of that intolerance is not symmetrical.

Year after year, the strongest Republicans in the survey reported tolerance for opposing speakers that was roughly 10 to 15 percentage points higher than the tolerance the strongest Democrats reported for speakers on the right. Independents and students who only leaned left or right came closest to showing equal tolerance for both groups.

A drop in tolerance for right-wing speakers alone would fit the familiar story that conservative speakers face especially hostile audiences on many campuses, especially with majority left-leaning faculty. But falling tolerance for left-wing speakers points to a broader problem: Students may be losing interest in hearing controversial speakers at all.

Gender adds another layer. With few exceptions, women in every partisan group reported less tolerance than men for both left- and right-wing speakers. The gap was not enormous, but it was persistent across political identities and survey years. The data do not establish why that gender gap exists. But its consistency suggests it cannot easily be attributed to one party, one controversy, or one political moment.

Taken together, these findings offer little evidence that polarization is receding. Students remain more accepting of speakers who share their politics, while overall tolerance for controversial speakers appears to be declining.

For colleges that claim to foster serious debate and critical inquiry, that should set off alarms. Administrators and faculty members cannot force students to admire an invited speaker or sit silently through a bad idea. They can, however, teach students that allowing a speaker to appear is not an endorsement. It is an invitation to listen, think, question, or even protest (non-disruptively).

A university should prepare students to answer ideas they hate, not teach them that the presence of those ideas is itself intolerable.

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When it comes to efforts against students, on-campus attempts usually come from the left and are often initiated by students or faculty,1 while off-campus attempts usually come from the right and are often initiated by politicians or activist organizations. This is consistent with findings from FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming and Scholars Under Fire databases.

These disparities reflect different sources of influence. On campus, liberals often have strength in numbers among students and faculty, while conservatives off-campus are more likely to rely on public pressure, funding leverage, or political authority.

Administrators ultimately decide whether to punish student expression. The question, then, is which groups exert the most influence over those decisions.

Who succeeds more often?

We define an attempt as “successful” when it results in administrative punishment. Investigations are by far the most common administrative response.

Regardless of source or political direction, censorship attempts succeed at alarming rates. Attempts involving students or faculty result in administrative punishment 42% of the time, compared with 35% for attempts involving activists or politicians.

Individually, faculty-led efforts succeed at the highest rate, 48%, followed by students at 42%, politicians at 41%, and activist groups at 26%.

So although on-campus attempts are more numerous, they succeed at roughly the same rate as off-campus attempts. The more revealing difference lies in how administrators respond.

How admins respond

Administrators may issue public statements in response to censorship attempts, and their tone varies by source. When attempts are unsuccessful, their statements are relatively consistent across sources. But when attempts succeed, administrators respond differently to on-campus and off-campus pressure.

When students or faculty are the source of a successful attempt, administrators are twice as likely to condemn the targeted expression. When activists or politicians are the source, administrators are nearly three times as likely to issue a neutral statement.

A similar asymmetry appears in punishment severity. Successful attempts by activists or politicians result in students being suspended or separated from the institution or its funding2 24% of the time — nearly double the rate for successful attempts by students or faculty.

What does it mean?

These power dynamics appear to shape how administrators respond to student speech controversies. But whether the pressure comes from students, faculty, activists, or elected officials, administrators should not punish constitutionally protected expression.

Universities can better resist such pressure by adopting the Chicago Statement or a similar free speech policy statement, committing to institutional neutrality, aligning their rules with First Amendment standards, training students on free speech, and consistently defending protected expression.

FIRE stands ready to help.

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Just like FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database, which we explored last week, there are notable trends in the Scholars Under Fire data.

The first is that sanction attempts are more likely to come from the right of the scholar’s expression than from the left.

Almost half (44%) of the sanction attempts initiated from the right of the scholar’s expression involve public officials, and about three-quarters involve public officials, activists, and/or members of the general public. On the other hand, 61% of the attempts initiated from the left of the scholar’s expression involve students, and 89% involve students and/or faculty.

In other words, sanction attempts from the right are more likely to involve off-campus actors, while attempts from the left are more likely to involve on-campus actors.

This is similar to a pattern found in FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database — efforts to deplatform speakers and events that come from the left of the expression typically involve students and faculty, while efforts from the right of the expression typically come from public officials, activists, alumni and/or the general public. Scholar sanction attempts, however, are more likely to be successful than deplatforming attempts — with about three-quarters of the former (1,456 of 1,935) succeeding compared to roughly half of the latter (946 of 2,064).

It’s important to note that a handful of events are responsible for almost 600 of the scholar sanction attempts FIRE has recorded:

• In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, over 100 scholar sanction attempts occurred due to expression regarding Floyd specifically or race more generally. Most of these attempts came from the left of the scholar’s expression.

• The temporary removal of almost 400 books — most of which were authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited by scholars — from the shelves of the Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library in early 2024 following directives from the Pentagon to comply with President Trump’s executive orders opposing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. These attempts came from the right of the scholar’s expression.

• The aforementioned assassination of Kirk at Utah Valley University and the subsequent targeting of scholars for their social media comments about Kirk’s life and death. All of these attempts came from the right of the scholar’s expression.

At the same time, it is alarming that four of these five mass incidents have occurred over the past year and a half and that each one of these involved public officials.

This points to a troubling conclusion. Disputes over scholars’ speech are no longer confined to campus protests, faculty complaints, or calls for administrators to act. Increasingly, public officials are intervening directly — investigating faculty bodies, removing scholarly works, pressuring institutions, and seeking punishment for expression they disfavor.

The political direction of these campaigns matters, and the data should make us skeptical of claims that censorship is the exclusive province of either the left or the right. But the source of the pressure matters, too. When government officials use the power of the state to target scholars or institutions because of their expression, the threat extends beyond any individual controversy. It places academic freedom itself at the mercy of political power.

Universities should not punish scholars simply because their speech provokes outrage, attracts outside pressure, or becomes politically inconvenient. And defenders of free expression should apply that principle consistently — especially when the speaker’s views are unpopular, offensive, or opposed to their own. The Scholars Under Fire data show how often institutions fail that test. The recent surge in government-driven campaigns shows why passing it has become more urgent than ever.

The data say Kerby was right.

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FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database has now documented 2,057 attempts to prevent or punish campus expression since 1998, and one fact immediately stands out: censorship campaigns are remarkably bipartisan.

Of the total, 985 attempts came from the right of the expression while 952 came from the left. The rest came from both, from actors whose ideology could not be identified, or they involved non-ideological disputes.

But while censorship efforts from the left and the right occur with similar frequency, they take fundamentally different forms.

Efforts from the left typically originate on campus and are usually led by students, while efforts from the right typically originate off campus and are usually led by activist groups, public officials, or wealthy donors. Efforts from the left tend to use op-eds, social media, and online petitions to get their message across while efforts from the right threaten budgets, launch investigations, and demand resignations.

Another major difference is that efforts from the left tend to be more successful — about 50% succeed, compared to only about 40% from the right.

The purpose of FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database is not to determine which political faction is “worse.” Nor does documenting these trends imply that every campaign is morally equivalent or that every target of criticism deserves a platform. Members of any community are free to criticize speakers, organize protests, and express disagreement. But when criticism crosses into preventing others from speaking, or when institutions punish protected expression because of political pressure, that’s a problem.

If anything, the database demonstrates that threats to free expression are less about ideology than incentives. When people acquire the ability to suppress speech they dislike — whether through administrative influence, political office, financial leverage, or organized disruption — they often prove willing to use it.

That is precisely why viewpoint neutrality matters. Principles protecting expression cannot depend on who currently holds power. The political coalition capable of censoring today may find itself vulnerable tomorrow. Campus politics changes. Administrations change. Legislatures change. Student movements evolve. But the temptation to silence opponents remains remarkably constant.

The data remind us that censorship is not a problem of the left or the right. It is a recurring temptation that follows power wherever power resides. For anyone committed to free expression, that conclusion should be both sobering and clarifying.

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In search of a better understanding of what drives people to support free speech, I’ve looked at the relationship between various demographic and background factors and political tolerance (i.e. support for allowing various hypothetical speakers) in our College Free Speech Rankings data. Previously, we’ve seen some stark effects of various background factors. Any others we could look at that might have interesting results? Well, we have data on socio-economic status. Let’s make the free speech map broken down by that and ideology (with one plot for men and one for women):

Damn.

Among liberals and moderates, there’s very little relationship between economic class and tolerance. But among conservative students, the poorer you are, the more tolerant you’re likely to be. The effect holds for both men and women, and it’s no small effect: at roughly 10 percentage points in both dimensions, the gap between rich and poor conservatives almost rivals the gender gap. Indeed, among men, poor conservatives are nearly as tolerant of left-wing speakers as liberals of all classes.

I see two possible explanations here. The first is a sort of cross-classification effect, where having clashing or rarely-seen-together traits associated with diverse backgrounds or a variety of life experiences tends to broaden perspectives and increase tolerance. Being conservative and poor and a college student might, for instance, tend to give people more of an opportunity to see why people on both sides of the aisle believe what they do. This general thesis that having a diverse background is related to tolerance is loosely corroborated by other results, including mixed-race people having unusually high tolerance.

The second possible explanation is a selection effect: among, say, wealthy liberals, going to college is something approaching the norm. But for poor conservatives, going to college is anything but. If going to college is both unusual and seen as culturally aberrant or frowned upon, choosing to go anyway may often represent uncommon open-mindedness.

The code, data, and codebook used to generate these plots can be found here.

We recently saw that there’s a strong relationship between religion and political tolerance, measured by asking student believers whether they’d allow various hypothetical controversial speakers on campus.

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But that article had an important omission: it focused mainly on about a dozen “normal” religions. But when we asked about religion, we gave students an option to select “other” and write in a response. It turns out that a small number of students who took our survey possess…far more evolved spiritual beliefs. When asked what their religion was, their answers included:

• Baseball Gods

• CHRIST IS KING

• Disciple of Cthulu

• Fuck off

• I believe in GOD!

• Pastafarian

• im in direct communication with god

• All of the above, believe in every religion

• I forget

• Satanist/Atheist

• Witch

Right out of the gate, we have some strong evidence for my theory that all the wisdom academia used to contain has been concentrated into these 11 people, but we should probably double-check whether their esoteric beliefs lead them to tolerance. Let’s give tolerance scores for each individual, with 100% corresponding to those who would definitely allow all the controversial speakers listed, and 0% definitely allowing none:

Notice the person who registers 0% tolerance for left- and right-wing speakers. So if God is whispering directly into your ear, that might be a bad sign. That one’s a big shock to me too. And Cthulhu, a primeval tentacled cosmic-horror god-monster, seems to like speakers on the left significantly better than those on the right. Probably doesn’t mean anything though.

Okay, if we’re seeking to understand why people do and don’t support free speech, seeing what kind of personality traits and behaviors are associated with that support could be really useful. And this sort of open-ended-response data gives us, albeit in a very limited and noisy way, just that: a direct measurement of (some) students’ behavior.

We have a lot more than just joke responses. Many of the responses were “normal” religions not included in the options provided, such as Sikhism. Some were conventional but uncommon religions, such as Hellenism. Some people provided explanations of various levels of detail, with the longest being 56 words. And some, of course, forgot what religion they were.

These seem like importantly and interestingly different groups of people. So how tolerant is each group?

Buy something nice for the pedant in your life.

Among both sexes, those who gave long explanations are unusually tolerant (the dashed lines are averages for all students of that gender, not just those with open-ended religion responses). We saw before that people who report their religion with more precise categories — Protestant instead of Christian, Atheist or Agnostic instead of “nothing in particular” — tend to be substantially more tolerant. The substantially higher tolerance scores from those who gave long answers corroborates the idea that something related to giving long or precise answers — maybe thoughtfulness, or thoroughness, or tendency towards rigor, or something else — is related to support for free speech. And while it’s a small sample, it’s quite a strong effect. In fact, the average man who gave a long explanation would be slightly more tolerant than someone who said all speakers should probably be allowed to speak on campus, with nearly half saying all speakers should definitely be allowed. That’s…remarkably good.

Notably, the above plots use the average of left- and right-wing tolerance. That’s the single cleanest and easiest number to use (and allows for better comparisons across ideologies), but it also treats someone who is tolerant of speakers on only one side the same as someone who is equally tolerant of speakers on both sides, provided their averages are identical. We can address this by looking at minimum tolerance:

Using minimum tolerance, some of the effects are even starker. Despite men in our survey overall being vastly more tolerant than women on average, women who gave joke responses were more tolerant than men who gave joke responses.

I’m not immediately sure why this is; if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that among men, not taking this sort of thing seriously is lower-hanging comedic fruit, whereas joking about religious beliefs may come less naturally to women (indeed, giving joke responses at all was rarer among women, especially when considering that women outnumber men in our sample).

So what’s special about those who gave long responses that might be causing their increased tolerance? Let’s look at what they said, starting with two perfectly tolerant men argued against our classification scheme:

Anglican. Common mistake that there is an assumed binary between Catholic and Protestant (Anglican is neither)

Lutheran (LCMS) (the original Protestants, who are very different from Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, and especially Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are not Christian. I will not select an option that includes Jehovah’s Witnesses in the list of examples.) (By the way, JWs don’t even consider themselves to be Protestants either: https://www.jw.org/en/jehovahs-witnesses/faq/are-jehovahs-witnesses-protestants/)

Two other perfectly tolerant men:

Believe in God, don’t subscribe to a specific religion. But certainly not Athiest[sic] or Agnostic

Don’t do religion as that’s slavery to control the masses ... I have a soul and into high level spiritualism and metaphysics.

And one perfectly tolerant woman:

Wouldn’t consider myself LDS but I participate in that church.

They all seem thoughtful and independent-minded (whether by not adhering to a particular religion or by challenging the survey’s classification scheme), yet they mostly seem fairly community-oriented (three of the five attend religious services several times a week). Granted, part of those effects are maybe to be expected from the mere fact that we’re selecting for long responses (there’s more opportunity to seem thoughtful when you have a longer response). So what about the long responses from those who aren’t so tolerant? What’s different about them?

There are two such men:

I believe that interpretation (the act of bridging the gap (communicating between two entirely seperate[sic] souls)) is god. Art is religious ritual because it engages in interpretation. interpretation is the unknown that affects our lives for eternity — it is the single unknown that rules our universe and therefore is god.

Agnostic: I believe that there’s some higher power out there but there is no evidence of what it is.

Seemingly misusing the term Agnostic (which means unsure whether god exists, not unsure what form god takes). Notably, one of the perfectly tolerant students had a similar answer, but used the term correctly.

And three women:

raised methodist — not practicing anymore

Scholar of different religions, started Christian

Grew up catholic and no longer religious

All three used to be some sort of Christian, and aren’t anymore, and two are clearly non-religious now.

Indeed, all five responses seem to lack all the qualities I pointed out about the tolerant responses. They lack the (sometimes argumentative) tendency towards precision or rigor. None of them have the same obvious signs of community involvement, and I’d argue that they lack the independent-minded-ness too. Granted, one might respond that leaving Christianity demonstrates independent-minded-ness. Given the (alleged, I haven’t seen research on or looked into the topic) cultural pressures against Christianity in some social circles, I’m not so sure.

Obviously we should be very hesitant about drawing confident conclusions from small-n sentiment analysis, but those two groups seem to me maybe a step removed from night-and-day. On one side, we have two religious-classification-nitpickers, a freethinking Mormon-adjacent woman, a unique individual into “high-level…metaphysics,” and a guy who knows what “agnostic” means. On the other, we have two religious backsliders, a third person who’s possibly arguably also a religious backslider, a unique individual into art, and an “agnostic.” Anyone else not surprised which group is more tolerant?

There’s a final question we haven’t touched on yet, and it’s the most important of all: exactly which speakers did the Disciple of Cthulu want to allow on campus? He definitely wouldn’t allow “Transgender people have a mental disorder” or “Black Lives Matter is a hate group.” Looks like Cthulhu would fit right in at the sensitivity training. And he probably wouldn’t allow three other speakers.

But he definitely would allow the speaker who said, “The Catholic church is a pedophilic institution.” Not sure whether Cthulhu would think this is a knock on the Catholic church or some kind of selling point, but it sure wants everyone to be able to hear about it.

The code, data, and codebook used to create this article are here.

This essay was originally published by The Daily Wire on June 12, 2026.

A libertarian law professor who responded to FIRE’s recent national survey of law faculty offered a striking admission:

Whether justified or unjustified, I regularly hide beliefs from colleagues who are openly discussing important topics in the public interest out of fear of retaliation, particularly as a junior faculty member.

No administrator had disciplined him. No student had filed a complaint. Yet by his own admission, he and another colleague routinely conceal their views at faculty meetings and other public events, not because anyone ordered them to stay silent but because they worry that candor can carry professional costs.

That kind of silence is tricky to measure, but carries serious implications. And new data suggest it is relatively common in American law schools.

For a report released this week, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) surveyed 1,959 law faculty at 192 ABA-approved law schools. The findings reveal a profession caught in a contradiction: law professors overwhelmingly endorse free expression in principle, yet many describe an academic culture that discourages them from practicing it.

That should alarm anyone who cares about legal education. Law schools are supposed to be places that train students to make arguments they may not personally believe, stress-test ideas against the strongest opposing case, and examine precedents, doctrines, and historical cases that may offend some modern sensibilities. But that model depends on faculty willing to speak frankly and institutions willing to tolerate dissent.

More than half of the law faculty surveyed (56%) report that they at least occasionally feel unable to express their opinion because of how students, colleagues, or administrators might respond. And that number becomes even more striking when ideology is taken into account. Conservative law faculty, who are outnumbered three to one in the sample, were more likely than their liberal colleagues to report self-censoring (72% versus 50%), and three times as many conservatives, compared to liberals, reported at least occasionally hiding their political beliefs from other faculty in an attempt to keep their job (52% versus 17%).

The survey also found clear asymmetries in perceptions of institutional fit. While majorities of law faculty said a liberal individual would fit well in their law school, far fewer said the same about a conservative individual.

As one law professor put it:

In my law school, students get only half the story in most of their courses. There are no conservatives as full-time professors, and only a few moderates. Students who are moderate to conservative rarely share their views in class.

And this same professor connected that climate directly to his own choices:

For the past 15 years, I’ve seen our law students become less prepared for the adversarial nature of legal practice. I’m partly to blame, as I have modified my exams and exercises to avoid potentially controversial fact patterns and claims.

That self-indictment — “I’m partly to blame” — isn’t a complaint about administrators or colleagues (though they could be the other part). Rather, it’s an acknowledgement that retreating from difficulty is something he’s done, incrementally, over many years. All within the context of diminishing ideological diversity. Multiplied across a profession, that accumulation of small adjustments doesn’t just reflect the culture of law schools. It creates one.

Another law professor, a self-described strong Democrat, described the specific calculus self-censorship dynamics produce in his classes:

I teach cases without ever saying what actually happened in the case because I’m afraid to say those words (notably some first amendment cases address words I didn’t even know were slurs before reading the case).

A First Amendment professor, self-censoring while teaching First Amendment cases. By this professor’s honest admission we can see how his students are learning about free speech firsthand, but in this case by what isn’t being said. They are watching their professor decide that engagement with certain material is too risky, and filing that lesson away.

This is how habits can form and a culture can shift. Not necessarily through any speech code or disciplinary action (though it can come from there too). But through hesitation and daily acts of omission that students observe, absorb, and over time likely begin to mimic themselves.

Law students go on to become lawyers who argue cases in court, prosecutors who decide what charges to bring, judges who make rulings, policymakers who debate and enact laws and regulations. What they learn in law school isn’t just the law. It’s instinct. Habits. Principles. How to respond when an idea is uncomfortable. What to do when they’re on the unpopular side of an issue. Where to turn when silence is the path of least resistance.

In February 2024, the American Bar Association adopted Standard 208 which requires law schools to adopt, publish, and adhere to written policies protecting academic freedom and encouraging free expression. More than one in 10 law faculty support free expression policies. But the professor hiding his views at faculty meetings already knows his school has a free expression policy. The policy is not the problem, and though it is a good step, isn’t the complete solution either.

What we see from our new data from law faculty is that the culture within law schools appears to have taken a concerning turn. And written commitments alone don’t change cultures, people do. Through individual decisions about whether to speak or stay quiet. To participate in a debate, or pass. To publicly defend a colleague, or only offer private condolences. To prepare students for their professional careers by teaching the messy topics, or avoid them in hopes of receiving better student evaluations. These decision points provide opportunities for faculty to model courage, or model calculation.

Right now, for too many law faculty, silence appears to be winning… and their students are watching.

In our recent Law Faculty Survey, we asked law professors whether they believe that judges are politically neutral or politically biased, and we asked them what they teach their students.

Professors’ personal views are listed on the left, with what they say they teach on the bottom. Each row adds up to 100%, showing what professors with a given opinion teach:

Ouch.

Among law professors who think the judges are mostly politically motivated, over a third say they tell their classes otherwise, usually that judges’ motivations are mixed. Unsurprisingly, there’s a concentration on the main diagonal, corresponding to those who teach what they believe. But the deviations from the main diagonal, those who don’t teach what they believe, are striking. If we exclude those who just don’t talk about the issue, over 40% of professors who believe judges are politically motivated teach their students something else.

What could cause this? Believing one thing and teaching another could signal an intent to deceive. But there are reasons professors would give different responses to the two questions that don’t involve deceiving their students. Maybe these professors are trying to teach both sides, avoiding presenting their views on the matter as fact. Indeed, that seems much more responsible than teaching what you earnestly believe on a contentious issue as fact, in favor of letting students form their own conclusions. If I were teaching the debate (which I presumably would be), I’d probably respond, “I don’t characterize judges’ decision-making as either politically motivated or neutral.”

But I’d do that because it’s the technically-correct answer if I’m teaching the debate. Maybe some law professors who mean that they teach the debate, rather than a particular view, respond that “Judges are a mix of politically motivated and neutral” (the “mixed” option on the plot). If that’s what’s going on, there’s a puzzling asymmetry: professors who think the judges are mostly neutral don’t say “mixed” nearly as frequently as their less-cynical counterparts, those who think judges are mostly political.

Even if the motive is to deceive, it could be for pragmatic/pedagogical purposes — if one teaches students that judges are entirely political and will simply rule in favor of their biases, that discourages putting the effort into learning how to become an effective advocate when that won’t influence the result in the end. While I’d argue that the first obligation of professors is to the truth, even when unpleasant, this line of reasoning may account for many of the people who teach something they don’t believe.

That asymmetry, where many professors who believe judges are mostly political, but few who believe they’re mostly neutral, teach “mixed”, is notable: Whether the “judges are mixed” responses from those who think judges are mostly political (or mostly neutral) are due to dishonesty, teaching both sides the debate, something else, or all three, and whether they’re a sign of something good or bad, this asymmetry still means that the views of cynical professors are less likely to make it into the classroom.

The code, data, and codebook used to generate the plot above can be found on Github.

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But results from FIRE’s 2026 survey of nearly 2,000 law faculty suggest the reality may be more complicated. Among law faculty on the traditional academic ladder (assistant professor to associate professor to full professor), a familiar pattern emerges. Assistant professors were the most likely to report that they had refrained from expressing an opinion because of how students, colleagues, or administrators would respond. This reported self-censorship declined in step among associate professors, and then further among full and chaired professors.

This pattern may not be especially surprising. Advancement through the academic ranks is generally associated with acquiring greater status, job security, and professional autonomy. Thus, law faculty who have already earned tenure and established their reputations may feel less vulnerable to some of the social and professional pressures that can accompany controversial research.

It follows then that faculty at higher ranks were also less worried about losing their job because someone misunderstands something they have said or done. But one group did not fit this pattern. When the analysis was expanded to include law faculty who are adjuncts or lecturers — faculty who are not on the tenure-track and are generally at-will employees — something different emerged. And the data points are directly contrary to other findings involving this population in the broader academy.

Law adjuncts and lecturers, on average, reported less self-censorship than all ranks of tenured/tenure-track law faculty. They also reported being more comfortable discussing controversial topics than even chaired and distinguished professors, and were less worried about damaging their reputation because someone misunderstands something they have said or done. No meaningful differences emerged between the two groups for worry about losing their job.

While the survey itself can’t answer directly why law adjuncts and lecturers are such an anomaly, the structure of the legal academy suggests one possibility. Law schools, like other academic disciplines, rely on adjuncts and lecturers for teaching. But unlike many other academic disciplines, the professional identities of these instructors typically lie outside the academy. Law adjuncts and lecturers often include sitting and retired judges, practicing attorneys, law firm partners, prosecutors, public defenders, corporate counsels, elected officials, and other professionals who teach part-time while maintaining careers elsewhere.

For these instructors, teaching at a law school may be only one part of a much more expansive professional life. Their income, status, and reputation are likely less dependent on the approval of others. Instead, they are there to lend their expertise and teach. Period. And if their views or expertise are unwelcome or labeled as offensive, then it is the school’s loss. Or at least that’s one possibility.

Sure, nobody wants to receive poor student evaluations or to receive a cold shoulder from colleagues in the hall. But for adjuncts and lecturers, it likely matters a lot less what students, academic colleagues, faculty committees, or university administrators think. Thus, for free expression in the broader legal academy the distinction may not be simply tenured versus non-tenured. But instead it may be the degree to which one’s professional future depends on the academic institution itself, and on the broader social reputational system within the academy.

The legal academy occupies a unique position among academic fields, in part because law schools sit at the intersection of higher education and the legal profession, drawing faculty from both worlds. The survey’s findings by faculty rank suggests that the distinctions between ranks in this field matters. Whether, though, the patterns outlined here reflect differences in status, professional independence, or something else entirely remains an open question.

Even still, these results appear to point in a novel direction: in legal education, the faculty who feel the freest to speak may not be those at the top of the academic ladder, but instead those who are on a different ladder entirely.

For more data points on the free expression climate in law schools, check out the law faculty survey report.

Why are conservatives, and especially conservative women, more likely to self-censor? One reason might be to hide their political beliefs from professors (who skew heavily liberal) in order to get a better grade in class:

Only 6.5% of very liberal students say they hide beliefs from professors for a better grade fairly often or very often, compared to 37% of very conservative students, suggesting a fairly widespread fear of bias in professors among students on the right.

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Another potential factor is peer pressure. Are students possibly censoring themselves because they are afraid of what their classmates might say? It turns out that, yes, students censor themselves more often as the likelihood of a classmate reporting them increases, and more than they do to avoid being reported by a professor:

Students who believe another student won’t report controversial comments only self-censor about 11% of the time. Students who think another student is very likely to report speech will censor themselves about 41% of the time, or nearly four times as often. That’s larger than the gap between most broad demographic or ideological groups.

When students think a professor is very likely to report speech, they only censor themselves about 31% of the time, which suggests that fear of being reported by other students is a much bigger concern.

But now let’s consider where students are most afraid to say what’s truly on their minds. On a written assignment? In a class discussion? In a public disagreement with a professor? On a social media account tied to their real name? It turns out, it’s the social media account:

Nearly two-thirds of all students total say they would be somewhat or very uncomfortable expressing an unpopular political opinion on a social media account tied to their name. That’s more than any other setting we asked about. The survey doesn’t ask why, but the obvious difference is exposure: a named account expands the potential audience and preserves the record.

This is not only a conservative problem. Anxiety over social media is common. But in all contexts, conservative students feel the pressure more than their liberal counterparts: in class, in written assignments, and in campus common spaces.

There’s also a striking effect regarding what topics students find difficult to discuss:

Students who find free speech easy to discuss on campus are significantly less likely to self-censor. It’s not a difficult topic to discuss for most students, but the students who do find it difficult to discuss are also generally prone to self-censor.

Taken together, these patterns suggest a variety of factors driving self-censorship on campus, especially peer pressure. If colleges want to stop students biting their tongues, they might do well to build a culture where students aren’t afraid of each other.

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This was an ordinary act of community speech, rooted in American soil for 250 years.

But federal officials took aim at Kae’s group. They didn’t attempt to silence her directly. Instead, they demanded that Facebook do what the government cannot do itself: silence people discussing and criticizing its activity. Facebook immediately complied, cutting off over 100,000 members from a space they relied on for community information. The attorney general and secretary of homeland security then publicly took credit for the takedown.

But this was unconstitutional. It was censorship by proxy. Jawboning. And the First Amendment forbids the government from laundering censorship through private companies.

Kae’s experience is a more blatant and unsubtle evolution of a pattern previously seen in cases like Murthy v. Missouri: Government officials coerce platforms to suppress certain viewpoints without employing formal legal process. The mechanism is indirect but powerful. Speech is not banned outright, but it disappears because government officials apply pressure and platforms understand the consequences of refusing.

That leaves users with a basic question: Who is really setting the rules of the online public square?

Americans do not seem eager to hand that power to either side. In FIRE’s 2024 Social Media Report, 64% of Americans said they do not trust social media companies to make decisions about what speech is allowed online. That same portion also said they don’t trust the government to do it either.

Americans care not only about what platforms decide, but how they decide. In the September 2023 survey, 78% said unbiased moderation is important, 77% prioritized transparency about government involvement, and 71% supported appeal processes.

In other words, people may accept some level of online content moderation, but they are far less willing to trust systems that operate in the shadows with the government.

That concern becomes even sharper when government involvement is explicit. In FIRE’s latest edition of the National Speech Index, 75% of Americans said they were at least somewhat concerned about government pressure on tech companies to suppress viewpoints. And 77% said the same about government access to user data for surveillance.

Those concerns cut across ideology, but they shift with power. In the fall of 2023, Republicans were especially likely to distrust government involvement in speech decisions. By April 2026, liberals were especially likely to express concern about government pressure on tech companies.

That shift shows how quickly fears about censorship can change depending on who holds power and whose speech appears to be at risk. The First Amendment cannot depend on who’s in the White House. Government power may seem useful when aimed at your opponents, but becomes dangerous the moment it is aimed at you.

Jawboning is particularly corrosive because it is difficult to hold the government accountable for an action they pressured a third party into taking.

The same problem is likely to intensify as new technologies reshape public debate. FIRE’s June 2025 survey on AI in political campaigns found majorities worried that regulation could be used to suppress criticism or chill lawful expression. Whether the issue is social media moderation, government access to user data, or AI regulation, the principle is the same: The government cannot pressure private companies into suppressing lawful speech.

The future of free speech requires clear lines now.

Kae could have let the group vanish. She could have accepted defeat against Leviathan and moved on. Instead, she fought back. Together with FIRE, Kae is suing the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security to vindicate her First Amendment rights.

A federal court has already recognized the danger, finding Kae and her co-plaintiff likely to succeed on their First Amendment claims and blocking the government from continuing its coercion campaign.

Her story is not just about one Facebook group. It’s about whether Americans can document and discuss government activity in public without federal officials leaning on social media companies to make that speech disappear. It’s about whether the government can sidestep the Constitution by jawboning people into silence. Simply put, the government doesn’t get to decide what speech survives online. And it doesn’t get to conscript private platforms to do its censorship bidding for it.

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Data Byte

• Students who choose to identify as Protestant are the most tolerant religious group on campus.

• When given a choice between “Protestant” and “Christian,” most Protestant students seem to identify as Christian. Those who do are not nearly as tolerant as those who identify as Protestant.

• Mormon students are also very tolerant.

• Atheists and agnostics are especially tolerant of left-wing, but not right-wing, speakers.

• Buddhist and Hindu students are especially intolerant of right-wing speakers.

• Catholic students have the lowest average tolerance.

Deep Dive

We’ve seen before that students who frequently attend religious services as well as students who are studying religion are unusually tolerant of controversial speakers1, meaning they are willing to let them speak on campus. (We measure left- and right-wing tolerance by whether students say they would allow those controversial speakers on those sides.) This raises a few questions. Are religious people more tolerant? More specifically, which religions’ members tend to be more tolerant? (When I refer to people of a particular religion in this article, unless otherwise indicated, I generally mean those who identify as that religion.)2

Look at the following map. Being higher up means that a religion has greater average tolerance, while being more to the left or right means that a group shows bias in those directions.

Looks like God’s been busy.

Okay, there’s a lot going on here. Protestants are the most tolerant, so we’ll look at them in more detail. (Mormons are nearly as tolerant, though more right-biased, but we have more data on Protestants, so they’ll be easier to examine.) The first thing one might ask is whether Protestants are more tolerant because of their religion. We already know that, at least among college students, there’s a large gender tolerance gap (men are more tolerant than women) and a small ideology tolerance gap (conservative students are slightly more tolerant than liberal students). So then are Protestants more tolerant because they’re more likely to be male (or conservative)?

We can check by making a scatterplot binned by ideology, gender, and whether the person is Protestant or not, then seeing whether each Protestant point is more tolerant than the corresponding non-Protestant point:

So that’s hard to read. To make it clearer, we’ll make vector difference plots showing the vectors from non-Protestant to Protestant within each ideology and gender. Each line shows the path from non-Protestants of that ideology/gender to their Protestant counterparts. In other words, we can show how much “the Protestant effect” impacts tolerance for a certain group, regardless of how well that group does overall. We are not showing causation. That is, factoring in the Protestant effect doesn’t mean being Protestant is the cause of higher tolerance, just that the two are correlated. So, here’s a look at the Protestant effect for men and women:

When it comes to nearly every ideology or gender, Protestants are significantly more tolerant than their non-Protestant counterparts, and not only that, they’re usually more tolerant of both sides. So the Protestant effect isn’t (primarily) a result of gender or ideology. For some reason, Protestants are just unusually tolerant of controversial speakers. We can also show this (less intuitively, but more concisely) by just making a version of the religion free speech map that controls for gender and ideology:

Protestants remain unusually tolerant.

We can more closely examine what these tolerance differences look like by making heatmaps. Below, each small diamond is a particular set of left- and right-wing tolerances, and the brighter squares are where more of that group is:

Ah. So the big effect here is that Protestant men and women have roughly double the chance of being perfectly tolerant of their non-protestant counterparts. Whatever’s going on, it’s primarily about Protestants having a higher chance of being perfectly tolerant, rather than a general increased tolerance.

Okay, wait a minute. That’s about four thousand Protestants in a sample of over 68,000 students. Only four thousand? That doesn’t seem right. Let’s check how many students are in each religion:

There are a lot more students who identify as Catholic than Protestant, but even more who identify as “Christians.” Given that Protestants outnumber Catholics in the general population, while we can’t be certain, this sure looks like most Protestants tend to identify as “Christian,” whereas most Catholics tend to identify as “Catholic.”3

The Protestants who identify as “Protestant” are unusually tolerant, but the Protestants who identify as “Christian” aren’t. So what’s different about those two groups that could cause this? Well, maybe the Protestants who identify as “Protestant” tend to be more devout. Do the students who identify as “Protestant” attend services more than those who identify as “Christian”?

Well, there we go. Clearly, the answer is “yes.” On a separate note, it’s notable that Mormons, the other group with similar tolerance to Protestants, top the religious attendance chart.

On a separate note, remember that we’re looking at college students here. Colleges are often hostile environments towards conservatives or dissenting voices. What if there’s a selection pressure that means only the most tolerant Protestants decide to go to college? Ideally, we’d hope to ask the same questions to a large nationally representative sample. While we do have national data on free speech and religion (Protestants don’t do particularly well on allowing people to speak), the sample sizes are much smaller, it doesn’t ask the tolerance questions, and — very importantly — the religion data doesn’t include a separate Christian category.

So how else can we check for selection effects? Well, I’d imagine that pressures against Protestants or conservatives (which Protestants are more likely to be) are much smaller or nonexistent at conservative schools.4 Let’s make our map again, but this time we’ll exclusively use data from schools with conservative student bodies:

Unsurprisingly, there’s general rightward movement, but Protestants remain unusually tolerant. So it’s unlikely that Protestant tolerance is a selection effect.

We see a similar thing happen with atheists and agnostics compared to students who cite “Nothing in particular” as their religious belief. In both cases, the group willing to use more precise labels to describe themselves is significantly more tolerant.5

There’s an entertaining final piece of evidence that something like religious devotion is tied to greater tolerance. If someone selects “Other” for religion, it allows an open-ended response. Out of 68,510 students who responded to the survey, two used the open-ended response to argue with our classification scheme:

Anglican. Common mistake that there is an assumed binary between Catholic and Protestant (Anglican is neither).

Lutheran (LCMS) (the original Protestants, who are very different from Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, and especially Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are not Christian. I will not select an option that includes Jehovah’s Witnesses in the list of examples.) (By the way, JWs don’t even consider themselves to be Protestants either: https://www.jw.org/en/jehovahs-witnesses/faq/are-jehovahs-witnesses-protestants/)

Both students were perfectly tolerant of both sides, i.e. would definitely allow all speakers. This is only two students, so it shouldn’t be taken as strong evidence,6 but it’s still striking.

So okay, is Protestantism making people more tolerant? We can make a reasonable guess about which way the causality goes here. While we don’t have anything here that rules it out with complete confidence, it seems unlikely that being politically tolerant causes students en masse to convert to Protestantism. Much more likely is that either Protestantism teaches tolerance, that environments that raise people to be Protestants also tend to raise them to be more tolerant, or that some other factor causes Protestants to be more tolerant.

I don’t have immediate answers about what exactly seems to produce the Protestant effect. But if we can identify why this is happening, it might point us towards powerful tools to build a free speech culture. This one might be really useful.

The code, data, and codebook used to generate these plots are available here.

The Catholic church is a pedophilic institution.
The police are just as racist as the Ku Klux Klan.
Children should be able to transition without parental consent.

Transgender people have a mental disorder.
Abortion should be completely illegal.
Black Lives Matter is a hate group.

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Notably, the average American opposes censorship far more than college students in this country. Most Americans reject overtly violent censorship tactics. In fact, only 18% say it’s at least rarely acceptable to use violence to stop a speaker, compared to 33% of college undergraduates — and 27% last fall despite the murder of Charlie Kirk weeks before.

The new NSI data also shows liberals are more accepting than conservatives of shouting down speakers or blocking them. Very liberal Americans are also more accepting of shouting down speakers than moderate Americans.

There’s no significant difference when it comes to using violence to stop a speech, but a lot of Americans support such tactics and that support has remained relatively unchanged over the past two years, despite multiple assassination attempts against President Trump, an assassination attempt against Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and the assassinations of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk.

The NSI also asked Americans how acceptable it is to use legal protest tactics that are fully protected by the First Amendment, such as heckling the speaker before they deliver their remarks, silently holding up protest signs during the speech, or peacefully protesting outside the speech.

First, some good news. Almost no American surveyed, regardless of their ideological views, said that it is ever unacceptable to peacefully protest outside the speech. That said, significantly more liberals were accepting of peaceful protest than their moderate and conservative counterparts — but not their very conservative counterparts. If nothing else, these findings show that Lizardman’s Constant, which says about 4% of any survey will give bizarre or insincere results, is alive and well.

Yet, when it comes to other protected forms of protest, very liberal and liberal Americans were significantly more supportive of their use than moderate, conservative, or very conservative Americans. Just 4% of very liberal Americans surveyed, and just 6% of liberals, said that it was “never” acceptable to attend a speech and silently hold up a protest sign, compared to 9% of moderates, 12% of conservatives, and 18% of very conservative Americans.

Heckling a speaker before their remarks was less popular. Most moderates (52%), conservatives (58%), and very conservative respondents (62%) said this was “never” acceptable. But only 35% of liberals and 22% of very liberal Americans agree. And liberals are much more likely to say heckling before remarks is “never” acceptable compared to very liberal Americans. Simply put, the more you stand to the left, the less likely you are to oppose this form of protest.

Taken together, these results point to a clear pattern: liberals are generally more accepting of the protest tactics we asked about, including both protected forms of protest and tactics that can interfere with other people’s expressive rights.

They are more supportive of peaceful protest, silent sign-holding, and heckling a speaker before their remarks. But they are also more accepting of shouting down speakers and blocking others from entering speaking events. And these two types of tactics should not be treated as interchangeable.

In other words, liberals seem to support all forms of protest, even illegal ones, whereas conservatives are more likely to oppose protest tactics, even some protected ones. But a healthy culture of free speech requires defending the right to protest while drawing a firm distinction between dissent that adds to public debate and dissent that shuts it down. Thankfully, that line is clearly drawn by the legal contours of the First Amendment.

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But as a May Day rally on campus ended about an hour before Dean’s scheduled appearance, one student organizer told the remaining crowd that a speaker from Google’s Gemini AI was about to appear nearby and encouraged them to help him disrupt the event.

At 1:37 p.m., protesters entered the Grimes Engineering Center. Most of them chanted, “UC, UC, you can’t hide, you are funding genocide.” At least one walked onto the stage with a megaphone and asked Dean, “What do you say for your AI being used to kill Palestinians?” Dean replied that he was there to deliver a “scientific lecture.”

At 1:47 p.m., event organizers announced that the event would be shut down.

This episode is not an outlier, but part of a pattern that is accelerating. Since noting a little over a month ago that we are on pace for a record number of deplatforming attempts this year, we’ve recorded another 38. That increases this year’s tally to 108, over a span of basically four months. That’s already the fifth-highest total for a year in the entire database, which begins in 1998. And even though the success rate of these attempts declined from the staggering 93% we previously reported, it remains incredibly high at 72% (78 successful attempts).

By “deplatforming attempt,” we mean an effort to prevent a speaker, performer, artwork, or event from being heard or seen, whether through disruption, disinvitation demands, administrative cancellation, or pressure that leads a speaker to withdraw.

To be clear, protest is not the problem. Students have every right to picket, criticize, ask hard questions, and condemn speakers they find objectionable. The line is crossed when protest becomes a veto, when the goal is not to answer speech with more speech, but to ensure no one else can hear it, and incidents of that nature are becoming rampant. Indeed, the following ones all occurred over the past month:

• Administrators at Cape Fear Community College required the removal of a “No Kings” protest sign from the set of an opening-night student performance of the play The Bacchae due to political concerns.

• Noa Cochva, a former IDF combat medic and Miss Israel 2021, withdrew from speaking at the University of Oregon due to safety concerns after a large protest gathered at the reserved outdoor space. and organizers said protesters were blocking access and disrupting the event area. Cochva also had an invitation to speak at the University of Washington revoked due to safety concerns.

• Conservative political commentator and media host Stephen Crowder withdrew from a debate at the University of Pennsylvania with professor Jonathan Zimmerman, because the university refused to allow the debate to be livestreamed due to “safety concerns.”

• Students at the University of California in Los Angeles repeatedly attempted to disrupt a discussion between James Percival, the Department of Homeland Security’s general counsel, and Gregory McNeal, a Pepperdine law professor, by shouting questions, booing, holding signs with anti-ICE messages, playing sound effects, and making additional noise after the panelists were introduced.

• Pamela Evette, South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, had her invitation to deliver the commencement address at South Carolina State University revoked after a student-led petition demanding Evette’s disinvitation because of her political views garnered almost 9,000 signatures.

• Rutgers University revoked an invitation to alumnus Rami Elghandour, CEO of Arcellx, to deliver a commencement address after students objected to his social-media posts accusing Israel of war crimes and apartheid.

• Multiple attempts to disrupt the “Triggered: From Combat to Campus” tour — featuring Israeli Defense Force soldiers and/or reservists — on campuses across the country.

So, for those keeping score, that’s 108 deplatforming attempts in 17 weeks so far this year. Or basically one every day. These attempts are happening everywhere — at prestigious institutions like UPenn, UCLA, and UC Berkeley, and at lesser known schools like South Carolina State University, Western Washington University, and Cape Fear Community College.

The pace and volume of these attempts is breathtaking. If current trends hold, we can expect roughly 330 deplatforming attempts this year, which would shatter 2024’s record of 180. And, while that 330 figure probably won’t be reached, this year is still already the fifth-highest ever for these attempts and it’s only May 7.

This is alarming. Colleges do not have to invite every speaker. But once they do, they have an obligation to make sure the event can proceed. Students may protest, condemn, and challenge. They should not be allowed to veto. If campuses cannot maintain that distinction, the record being set this year will not just be a statistical milestone. It will be a warning about what higher education is teaching students to do with disagreement.

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We began by asking students whether they would allow six hypothetical controversial speakers on campus, three from the right and three from the left. Some students, let’s call them “Saints,” said they would definitely allow all six speakers. But this was only 4% of students. Then you’ve got “Demons,” who would definitely not allow any of the speakers. Finally, there are “Witches” who would only allow speakers whose views they support.

For each of those groups, we then did sentiment analysis of their own descriptions of moments when they censored themselves on campus. The results were fascinating.

One thing that immediately jumped out was that across all three groups, emotional reasoning is more common than rational thinking. On today’s campuses, the divide over free speech isn’t just about who gets to speak but about whether students are thinking or feeling their way to that answer, and the data isn’t good.

The selectively censorial Witches show the most emotional reasoning. If a particular viewpoint makes them feel bad, they don’t want that speaker platformed. By contrast, rational arguments are most common among Saints. As one student said, “I did not agree with the speaker, but everyone should be allowed to speak to create a diverse environment.” But Saints also lean more on emotional appeals than rational ones. In other words, even the most principled group operates less on principle than on how situations feel.

Things get bleaker still when you ask why students censor themselves.

Across all three groups, a common reason students self-censor is to avoid personal consequences, such as judgment from peers, especially the Saints. Another sentiment expressed in the self-censorship responses is a belief that certain viewpoints should not be openly expressed. Interestingly, more Witches mentioned this than avoiding personal risk. As one student said, “When they were talking about transgenders . . . I do not think that should be allowed.”

We then drilled down on more specific reasons for self-censorship. Fear of professors stands out as the top reason given by all groups, especially Saints. Saints also generally report higher sensitivity overall. This makes sense since they oppose censorship and are therefore more sensitive to factors that might cause it. Meanwhile, Witches are more worried about administrative pressure and protests compared to other groups. It’s also worth noting that grade fear is relatively low across the board, suggesting academic penalties usually matter less than social dynamics or pressure from authority figures.

What emerges from all this is a picture of a campus climate in which student self-censorship is less about formal punishment and more about perceived pressure, where even the students who are most committed to open expression are navigating that pressure with their instincts more than their principles. This has two implications. First, policy alone won’t fix the problem. Universities can adopt strong free speech statements, but if students expect social or institutional backlash, they’ll stay quiet. Second, the case for free expression itself is eroding where it matters most: how students actually think.

This is deeply disturbing because if support for free speech rests more on how situations feel, that makes it incredibly fragile. And if students’ willingness to speak up is being throttled by fear of their own professors, the impulse is being killed before it’s even fully formed.

Two of the most visible student groups in the country — Students for Justice in Palestine and Turning Point USA — have next to nothing in common except: both are frequently targeted for their protected speech. Together, they account for 24% of all group entries in FIRE’s Students Under Fire database going back to 2020.

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In case you don’t know these two groups, one advocates for Palestinians while the other advocates for conservatives, and they are no strangers to controversy. For example, in February 2026, Israel’s consul general in New York sent a letter to leaders at CUNY School of Law demanding the cancellation of an event organized by the school’s SJP chapter, which described Hamas’ tunnel network as “decolonial land use.” And in February 2021, student groups at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas demanded the derecognition of TPUSA over allegations that the national Turning Point Action “bused domestic terrorists to the Capitol and attacked our democracy.”

But this is not to suggest that the two groups are themselves perfect on free speech. SJP is known to disrupt campus events, such as the 2024 discussion between Bari Weiss and Frank Bruni at UNC Chapel Hill. TPUSA doesn’t really do that, though their national organization does maintain a Professor Watchlist to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Some entries in the watchlist include the contact information for administrators, ostensibly for visitors to file complaints.

Nevertheless, both groups are provocative. And both claim their speech is uniquely under assault. SJP says there is a “Palestine exception,” a pattern of discrimination against those advocating for Palestinians or against Israel. TPUSA says campuses are overrun with intolerant “woke leftists” who want to silence conservative voices. But the data tells a more complex narrative, one in which censorship on each side is real, yet also asymmetric.

Who started it?

Even a cursory glance at the data immediately reveals that censorship efforts against these two groups come from completely different places.

Roughly 75% of censorship efforts against TPUSA come from their fellow students, compared to only 20% against SJP. Students are by far the main censors targeting TPUSA. Administrators do too, to a lesser degree. And they are not really targeted by politicians. By contrast, SJP’s censors strike a closer balance among all three groups, but SJP experiences about seven times as many censorship efforts from politicians as TPUSA.

How are they punished?

Given the sources of these censorship efforts, it’s little surprise that these two groups would end up facing different sets of consequences for their speech. After all, administrators respond with a different range of disciplinary options than student governments.

As it turns out, 51% of all campaigns against SJP result in some sort of administrative punishment, compared to only 29% for TPUSA. But, interestingly, both groups are being punished at lower rates than all other student groups combined.

While SJP faces administrative punishment more often than TPUSA, these dealings are often less consequential. About 32% of administrative punishments against TPUSA result in the denial or loss of recognition. That’s above the average for all other student groups, which is only 10%, and far more than the 7% for SJP.

This pattern is even more pronounced when looking at student governments. Not only do student governments discipline TPUSA far more often than SJP — 26% vs. 2% — but they also deny or revoke TPUSA’s recognition practically every time (92%).

What about admins?

How institutions respond to speech controversies matters, which is why FIRE endorses institutional neutrality, because even well-intentioned statements of such a nature can have a chilling effect. And when it comes to SJP and TPUSA, the data is clear: administrators are far more likely to speak out against SJP than other groups.

When SJP is the target of a speech controversy, administrators issue public statements condemning its expression about a third of the time (30%), or double the rate of all other groups and nearly four times as often as they do in response to speech controversies involving TPUSA (8%). When it comes to actual punishments of these groups, the numbers get even worse: administrators condemn SJP’s expression up to 45% of the time, other groups 21% of the time, and TPUSA only 14% of the time.

On top of that, when TPUSA is the target, roughly 24% of the time administrators put out what we call an “Honor Roll” statement explicitly supporting the students’ expressive rights. In other words, the administrators speak up in the students’ defense. That’s twice as often as they do when other groups face down a censorship campaign, and thrice as often as they do when it’s SJP (8%).

What does it all mean?

As is so often the case when it comes to campus censorship, all sides have good reason to complain. The winds of campus censorship highlighted in last year’s Students Under Fire report have only grown stronger, with 2025 setting records for all the wrong reasons. So how do we slow them down and create a healthier climate for all students?

For starters, administrators can adopt an official position of institutional neutrality and better educate student governments, which must often act as agents of the institution, on the importance of freedom of speech. Student governments can likewise adopt neutral positions, recognizing that when they deny certain groups status or access to resources, they only deepen conflict and fuel resentment.

We live in divided times. If students are discouraged or prohibited from even talking across differences, that divide will not just persist, it will grow, and for the worst possible reason: not because they simply come to different conclusions on important issues, but because they don’t even know or understand what their opponents think.

So that’s not great.

In our National Speech Index, FIRE asks the general public a variety of questions related to free speech, including: How acceptable is it to use physical violence to stop someone giving a speech in their community? Gen Z are 9.6 times more accepting of violence against speakers than Baby Boomers1, and over 25 times more accepting of violence against speakers than the Silent Generation2. Each successive generation is more supportive of violence against speakers than the last, in most cases more than twice as supportive. About 43% of Gen Z say violence against speakers is at least rarely acceptable, and over a quarter say it’s sometimes or always acceptable3.

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I consider this an illegitimate (and ineffective) response to legitimate grievances. Whether one believes that there’s a lot wrong with our country or leadership; that Gen Z has gotten a raw deal economically; or even that our politics are completely broken — that break is in part because we have lost the ability to sit down and talk our problems out. Hurting or killing speakers doesn’t fix political issues. It doesn’t do anything about the problems driving the grievances people have. It just foments chaos and creates a new problem to fix.

But is this support for violence more a liberal problem? Young people tend to be more liberal, so maybe that’s the real source of the effect. To check, let’s separate the age groups by ideology:

Nope4.

Regardless of ideology, Gen Z is vastly more likely to endorse violence against speakers than Boomers, with that effect being strongest among the “very conservative.” This is primarily a generational divide, and the impact of ideology is a distant second. But the intersection of age and ideology does produce some very interesting effects. When we ask, for instance, about whether offensive speakers should face consequences, we see the opposite effect for old and young liberals:

Heck of a fall.

Compared to any other ideology, young and middle-aged liberals show more support for punishing offensive speakers. When it comes to older people, the opposite is true. In our data, young liberals are the most censorious group while old liberals are the least censorious5. One explanation is simply that we are seeing a semantic shift whereby for many measures, “liberal” has come to represent the opposite of what it once did. Think “woke” vs. old-school Progressives and Classical Liberals.

For those who care about free speech and a culture of open discourse, this should warrant serious attention. I don’t have a silver bullet here. I don’t think there is one. But when this many people start to say they are willing to resort to such a desperate solution, we have to confront the problem before the problem confronts us.

The code, data, and codebook used to generate these plots can be found here.