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.

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Our data on the general population is less comprehensive than our student data. We don’t ask the same speaker-tolerance questions. But we do ask people whether they agree with the claim, “Words can be violence.” It seems likely that people who think words are violence are more likely to support censorship. The phrase is also a slogan among left-wing activists. But how widely held is this idea, and who holds it?

To figure that out, consider the scatterplot below, showing men on the left and women on the right. Each marker indicates a different political ideology, such as “conservative” or “very liberal.” The lower down each marker sits in a column, the more that group agrees with the claim, “Words can be violence.” The first thing to notice is that liberals, men and women alike, are more likely than conservatives to think words can be violence. That’s not too surprising. But take another look.

It turns out, this belief is not just a disproportionately liberal opinion — it’s also a disproportionately female one. In fact, even very conservative women are more likely to think “words can be violence” than very liberal men. Also, it seems the gender gap here is growing compared to last year, though there’s enough noise that it’s very uncertain.

Notably, the size of the gender gap varies significantly depending on what sort of question you ask, including in some ways that I wouldn’t have guessed. When we ask people whether offensive speakers should face consequences, we see a much smaller gender gap.

If I had to hazard a guess at why men and women are more in agreement here, I’d assume it’s because unlike with most of our questions, or public framings for that matter, there’s more emphasis here on how censorship can harm people. All you champions of free speech, take note. It might be that emphasizing the harm of censorship is a more effective way to get women engaged in the issue.

As one might expect, the gap reemerges when we look at aggression and ask whether Americans should have the right to curse at politicians.

Men are more okay with cursing at politicians than women, by and large. Very liberal women are also okay with it. Unsurprisingly, conservative women are not fans of profanity. But very conservative men are.

It’s striking to see how often speech issues don’t divide along simple political lines. Support for free speech isn’t a simple story about whether people agree with opinions or not. Oftentimes, it’s more influenced by social factors including gender, or driven by personality traits such as disagreeableness, or even more bizarre factors.

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An analysis of 72 campus deplatforming attempts — efforts to stop public expression on college campuses — from 1947 to 1999 shows that these efforts have their roots in the immediate post-World War II period.

In the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, almost every incident in the sample comes from someone to the political right of the expression they are targeting, and almost all of them were successful. Campus speaker-bans, ruled unconstitutional in 1968, were used to bar communists, communist sympathizers, and socialists from speaking on campuses across the country — including at Columbia University, UC Berkeley and UCLA, University of Michigan, and the University of North Carolina. But by the 70s, this pattern had reversed and deplatforming attempts now came overwhelmingly from the other direction.

The 1970s were the high-water mark of 20th century campus deplatforming with a total of 19 attempts. While earlier controversies centered around political views and the Cold War, deplatforming efforts in the 70s pivoted sharply to race. That shift was driven largely by repeated controversies involving William Shockley, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist turned eugenicist and, often, Roy Innis, the national director of the Congress on Racial Equality. Together, they account for nearly three-quarters (14 in all) of the deplatforming attempts that decade.

Shockley’s role is especially important. He had become a national symbol of controversy because of his views on race and intelligence. Invitations to speak on campus no longer functioned like ordinary academic events, but instead became flashpoints. When he was invited to speak at a symposium at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in May 1968, a small group of faculty complained and the convocation was ultimately canceled, despite 493 scientists and engineers having already agreed to come, for fear of violence. Harold Taylor, the former president of Sarah Lawrence College, said of the scandal, “If we are never to discuss any controversial issues for fear there might be demonstrations, then the whole purpose of the university is destroyed.”

Innis matters here too because of his repeated connection to Shockley, and his willingness to debate him. In 1973, Innis was scheduled to debate Shockley on television on the topic of black intelligence, but Innis pulled out at the last moment because the student society at Princeton, which was organizing the event, would not grant access to the press or public. In 1974, Yale canceled a debate between Innis and Shockley on eugenics, an infamous decision that led to the publication of the Woodward Report, in which the university made the protection of freedom of expression an official school policy.

The 1980s brought geopolitics back. The decade’s deplatforming attempts were about the Cold War conflict, with Central America looming large. That makes the 80s distinct from both the anti-communist postwar years and the Shockley-driven scandals of the 70s. Now the targets were often appointees in the Reagan administration — figures like UN envoy Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, CIA Director William Casey, or Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger.

The 90s are the most politically mixed decade of all. There is a roughly even number of censors on the left and the right of the targeted expressions, the topics are all over the map, and the targets range from pro-choice commencement speakers to racial firebrands, conservative political figures, and culture-war provocateurs. Rather than one coherent wave, this decade looks like a transitional moment. This is the period when campus deplatforming began to take on the fragmented and multi-issue character it would have in later years.

But regardless of the decade, the attempts often succeeded. Of the 72 incidents in the sample, 53 ended by successfully deplatforming the target, including essentially all those prior to 1970. That’s a 74% success rate. But if that era was bad, the current one is even worse.

The 20th-century shows that campus deplatforming is not new. It has roots in the immediate post-World War II period, shifts ideological direction over time, and repeatedly clusters around the dominant controversies of a given era: anti-communism, race and intelligence, Central America, abortion, immigration, and the culture wars. But deplatforming attempts have become far more numerous since 2015. In the last few years, they’ve intensified even more: 171 in 2023, 179 in 2024, and 172 in 2025. We’ve already recorded 77 in just the first three months of this year. That’s more than the total number attempts in the entire dataset spanning from 1947 through 1999.

The post-World War II era saw widespread efforts to keep disfavored speakers off campus, often with remarkable success. But the modern era appears worse not simply because deplatforming still exists, but because it has become more frequent, more sustained, and in the most recent data, more successful. A 74% success rate in this 20th-century sample is troubling enough. But early 2026 data reveals a 93% success rate. The lesson is not merely that campus deplatforming has a long history, but that we are far from done with this fight. Indeed, by one crucial measure, this is our darkest hour.

“If it is protected, we will defend it … If you are a censor, we will fight you.”

– Bob Corn-Revere on maintaining principle in a time of polarization, Delaware Inns of Court keynote, March 2026.

Supreme Court revives protester’s lawsuit

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously allowed a Mississippi man to proceed with a First Amendment challenge against a law restricting demonstrations to designated zones.

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The ruling clarifies that individuals can challenge speech restrictions prospectively — even if they were previously convicted under them — potentially expanding avenues for constitutional litigation.

Big Tech verdicts threaten speech

Recent verdicts in California and New Mexico, targeting social media platforms’ algorithms and design features, signal a push to treat online speech as a defective product despite longstanding First Amendment protections for editorial judgment.

Here’s to explain:

No matter how you feel about social media, the minute we start treating speech as if it were just another physical product is the minute we hand the government the power to decide what we can read, watch, and say.

Below the fold

• Two protesters in Australia were arrested — and could face up to two years in prison — on the first day of Queensland’s ban on the slogan “From the river to the sea,” as part of new rules regulating protest speech related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Terms of service

In his essay “The great chatbot panic,” Tyler Tone argues that the current wave of lawsuits blaming AI chatbots for suicides and violent behavior echoes past moral panics over media like Dungeons & Dragons, music, and video games, where courts ultimately rejected attempts to hold creators liable for harmful ideas rather than tangible defects. He warns that treating chatbot outputs as a “product” subject to liability would undermine First Amendment protections and push AI companies to sterilize speech to avoid risk.

This week in history

On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry delivered a speech at the Second Virginia Convention urging the American colonies to take up arms against Great Britain. The speech is best known for the line, “Give me liberty or give me death.” He began by emphasizing the value of open debate and the right to express differing opinions. His remarks helped persuade the convention to adopt a resolution calling for the mobilization of troops, a pivotal step toward the American Revolution.

By the numbers

Only three months into the year, campus deplatforming is already on pace to set a disturbing new record, and if current trends hold, 2026 won’t just be a bad year for campus free speech. It’ll be the worst year on record for campus deplatformings.

In just the first three months of this year, there have been 70 such attempts. Even worse, 65 of those attempts succeeded — the highest success rate we’ve ever recorded in any year with 10 or more attempts.

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FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database tracks efforts to stop public expression on college campuses — disinviting speakers, canceling performances or film screenings, removing art, or disrupting events while they are happening. In just the first three months of this year, there have been 70 such attempts. Even worse, 65 of those attempts succeeded — the highest success rate we’ve ever recorded in any year with 10 or more attempts.

Universities’ responses to deplatforming attempts reveal whether their stated commitments to free inquiry and open debate mean anything in practice. Each successful cancellation teaches students, faculty, and organizers the same lesson: controversial expression is a liability, and institutions tend to care more about ducking trouble than standing on principle.

This chills future expression, and recent controversies show how broad that impulse has become.

This week, the University of Southern California scrapped a gubernatorial debate after excluded candidates complained about the race of those invited — they were all white. This shut down what should’ve been one of the clearest examples of a university serving as a forum for democratic exchange. Universities often claim to prepare students for civic participation. Canceling a debate involving major political figures because the controversy “created a significant distraction from the issues that matter to voters,” sends the opposite message. Namely, that even core political discourse can be treated as too difficult or too risky to host.

At New York University, the administration reportedly told student organizers that they could not invite certain music performers to a concert because the performers were affiliated with the No Music for Genocide boycott of Israel. That decision illustrates an especially troubling dynamic: universities are not only reacting to speech after the fact, but increasingly preempting it.

When administrators reserve the authority to decide which artists are too controversial to be invited in the first place, student autonomy shrinks and institutional gatekeeping expands. The result is a campus culture in which permission for expression becomes contingent on administrative comfort.

Other incidents this year further demonstrate this pattern.

• The University of North Texas removed an art exhibit after an anonymous tip alleged the show included artwork denouncing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. UNT also just revoked approval for a drag show after the university system lifted its systemwide pause on drag performances last August.

• The Catholic University of America rejected requests from the campus chapter of Students Supporting Israel to host Randy Fine and Dany Turza at two separate events because the discussions would not feature a “balanced presentation” of views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

• And, the University of Southern Maine terminated its agreement to host a one-day conference, “The Consequence of Palestine,” because one of the scheduled speakers (Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967) has been sanctioned by the U.S. government and appears on the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s office of foreign assets control’s specially designated nationals and blocked persons list. Administrators said that hosting the event with a “sanctioned scholar” would violate federal law. Albanese was scheduled to appear remotely and organizers and free-speech attorneys argue that including Albanese as a remote, uncompensated speaker in a virtual event was not prohibited and required no authorization.

These cases differ in subject matter, politics, and format. But that is exactly the point. Deplatforming is not confined to one ideology or one type of event. It can target political debate, artistic expression, student entertainment, invited lectures, or academic programming. The common thread is a willingness to suppress expression rather than answer it, criticize it, or contextualize it.

Defenders of these cancellations often frame them as prudent, values-based, or necessary for campus harmony. Sometimes they invoke safety, reputational concerns, institutional mission, or community standards. But too often those rationales are vague, inconsistently applied, or selectively enforced. Universities rarely cancel events because they are truly incapable of supporting peaceful disagreement. More often, they cancel because controversy itself is treated as unacceptable.

That is a profound mistake. The university is one of the few institutions explicitly designed to accommodate disagreement. Students should encounter ideas, performances, and speakers they dislike, distrust, or find offensive. They should also learn how to respond: through protest, questioning, criticism, counterprogramming, and debate. Those are the habits of a free society. Deplatforming replaces those habits with passivity and permission-seeking.

That is what makes the 93% success rate so alarming. Failed deplatforming attempts can still cause harm, but they at least show that institutional safeguards are holding. A successful attempt signals that those safeguards are eroding. If nearly all deplatforming efforts are now succeeding, then the problem is not simply that controversial events are being challenged. The problem is that universities appear increasingly willing to fold under pressure.

These actions can have long-term consequences. Student organizers may stop proposing ambitious or provocative events because they fear resistance. Faculty may avoid controversial programming because administrative support feels uncertain. Artists and speakers may decline invitations if they believe universities cannot or will not stand by them. Over time, the chilling effect becomes more powerful than any one deplatforming. The lesson spreads quietly: do less, invite less, say less.

Seventy attempts in three months is troubling on its own. Sixty-five successful cancellations is worse. A 93% success rate suggests a campus speech environment in which those seeking to silence expression are winning.

This should concern anyone who believes higher education exists to test ideas rather than shelter institutions from them. If universities want to remain credible as places of inquiry, they must do more than praise free expression in mission statements. They must defend it even when it is inconvenient, contested, and costly.

A new survey of University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty, released this month by the school’s Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership, offers a clear look at how ideological imbalance shapes the campus climate at a flagship public university. Read alongside FIRE’s 2024 faculty survey, it tells a familiar story — just with sharper numbers.

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Among tenured and tenure-track faculty at UW-Madison, 70% identify as liberal, 21% as moderate, and just 9% as conservative — a ratio of almost 8-to-1. That’s not an outlier, but is part of a broader trend. Nationally, another recent analysis shows 74% of faculty identified as liberal and only 11% as conservative. By these numbers, compared to the general public, liberals are overrepresented in academia by 186% while conservatives are underrepresented by 70%.

This gap also may be widening as junior faculty at UW Madison skew more liberal than senior faculty, suggesting that as older professors retire, ideological homogeneity will deepen.

Ideology in hiring

The Thompson Center survey also tested for possible downstream effects of this ideological imbalance. Faculty respondents were randomly assigned to evaluate hypothetical job candidates expressing liberal or conservative views. The result: candidates with conservative views were consistently less likely to be supported for hiring, with gaps ranging from 11 to 38 percentage points depending on the topic. The topic of immigration produced the largest disparity.

Because the statements were randomly assigned, these results don’t reflect response bias or a general aversion to candidates expressing political opinions. Rather, the results reflect bias against academics with conservative viewpoints, plain and simple.

These findings mirror a growing body of independent studies and national surveys. FIRE’s 2024 survey also shows the same pattern. Among UW-Madison faculty in FIRE’s survey, only 44% said knowing an applicant was conservative would never count against them, compared to 69% who said the same about a liberal applicant. And while 76% said a liberal individual would be a good departmental “fit,” only 17% said the same about a conservative. These numbers were similar to faculty overall in FIRE’s survey. Importantly, in academic hiring, “poor fit” often translates into “not hired.”

Chilling effects

The imbalance doesn’t just shape hiring either. It also shapes who feels comfortable speaking.

At UW-Madison, only 23% of conservative faculty say they’re highly comfortable discussing controversial topics with colleagues, compared to 55% of liberals. The classroom also shows a similar divide. Similarly, FIRE’s 2024 national survey shows that nearly half of conservative faculty report self-censoring due to fear of backlash, compared to one in five liberals.

And when conservative faculty do speak up, they’re more likely to pay for it. Among UW-Madison faculty who expressed views on controversial topics in class, 20% of conservatives reported institutional consequences, compared to just 1% of liberals. On social media, the gap is 30% to 8%.

This is despite the fact that liberal faculty are more likely to say they express controversial views in the first place. In other words, one group speaks more freely and faces fewer consequences while the other speaks less and gets punished more when it does.

The bigger picture

None of this is happening in a vacuum, and this pattern extends beyond UW-Madison. FIRE’s 2024 survey of faculty finds that 55% of conservative faculty reported at least occasionally hiding their political beliefs from colleagues to protect their jobs, compared to 17% of liberals. And among the broader faculty population, the share of faculty self-censoring in their writing is nearly four times the rate recorded among social scientists at the end of the McCarthy era.

Taken together, the data point to a system where ideological imbalance doesn’t just describe who’s on campus but who gets hired, who speaks up, and who gets punished when they do.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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At these hyper-liberal schools, the topic is more than twice as difficult for liberals to discuss as any other issue.

Remember, the hyper-liberal schools discussed here are only a small group of schools, and don’t include any Ivies or other large schools, such as Columbia University. At those other schools, there are of course many examples of administrations going after students for protected pro-Palestinian speech.

While this phenomenon got worse after Oct. 7, the issue has been uniquely thorny for these students as far back as our data goes. In addition, disagreements among liberals or fear of social stigma may make the issue harder to discuss in general, but they do not explain why it is especially difficult at very liberal schools.

Students who don’t trust their administrations are significantly more likely to find it difficult to discuss the conflict. Liberal students at hyper-liberal schools are less trusting of their administration and more worried about discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even though they’re seemingly less likely to face punishment for pro-Palestinian protests there.

One generally assumes people are more comfortable sharing their views when surrounded by others who think the same way. So then why are liberal students at very liberal schools scared to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

In FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings survey, we ask students whether they’re comfortable discussing a variety of political issues.1 Which issues do they find difficult to discuss? Let’s begin by looking at students at moderate schools.2 In the scatterplot below, issues that conservatives find hard to discuss are closer to the top (measured on the vertical axis) while issues that liberals find hard to discuss are more to the right (measured on the horizontal axis):

This is about what I’d expect. The points fall along a diagonal line with a slope of roughly one, meaning conservatives and liberals roughly agree on which topics are difficult to discuss. Abortion and transgender rights are the thorniest. For women, the presidential election is also very difficult. China, crime, and SCOTUS are the easiest.

The offset from the center diagonal is interesting. At schools with close to perfectly moderate student bodies, liberal students still report greater difficulty discussing most topics. Given that most schools don’t exactly have administrations or environments that are disproportionately hostile to liberal students, it seems most plausible that this reflects a psychological difference between liberals and conservatives, perhaps greater neuroticism3 or anxiousness, a greater tendency to view one’s environment as oppressive, or something else. The fact that this gap is larger in women than men supports the notion that we’re seeing a psychological effect. That said, it’s not a massive effect.

But what about students at extremely liberal schools?

That’s a result.

For the most part, liberals at liberal schools are comfortable talking about every issue. We might’ve expected a diagonal with a larger offset or steeper slope, but instead we see a vertical blob. It’s not just that liberals have an easier time talking about most issues: the difficulty for the two sides becomes decoupled. Conservatives still have a difficult time talking about the normally difficult issues — abortion, transgender rights, and the 2024 Presidential Election — and an easy time with the normally easy ones — the Supreme Court, China, climate change — but liberals have an easy time with every issue. But these dynamics disappear for liberals at very liberal schools — echo chambers can seemingly make people more comfortable talking. To the small extent that some issues are tougher for liberals, it’s things like economic inequality, which aren’t normally thorny.

Until we get to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At moderate schools, it’s a normal political issue. For liberal students at liberal schools, it’s the difficult issue, with more than twice as many students finding it difficult to talk about than any other issue, even though they are surrounded by more like-minded peers than any other students.

So what’s going on here? Why is this issue so thorny? To understand why this happens, we look at four possibilities: the impact of Oct. 7, ideological divisions among liberals, fear of social stigma, and fear of administrative punishment.

October 7

First, the obvious: Presumably, this is a response to Oct. 7, the subsequent war, and the encampments. We can check that by making the scatterplot with (early) 2023 data:

Erm, what?

Oct. 7 and its aftermath coincided with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict becoming more difficult to discuss, but it’s been a uniquely difficult issue for liberal students at liberal schools for longer than that — in fact, since at least 2020, the first year we have data on this.

What’s so special about this particular issue?

Divisions among liberals

Well, there’s an unusual amount of disagreement amongst liberals of various shades. And the scatterplots binned together students who were anywhere from slightly to very liberal. At moderate schools, liberals tend to be more moderate. But at hyper-liberal schools, you tend to have more left-wing extremists. Maybe very pro-Palestinian students are uncomfortable discussing the conflict more often, and the difference between liberal students at various schools is just a question of how far to the left they are. To check this, let’s bin individuals by ideology (in addition to school leaning):

That’s part of the explanation. Very liberal students do have a tougher time discussing the conflict than moderately liberal students. But students at more liberal schools also have a harder time discussing it, regardless of ideology. A very liberal student at a far-left school is nearly 20 percentage points more likely to have difficulty than a very liberal student at a moderate school. For moderately liberal students, the gap is even larger. More liberal schools genuinely seem to be tougher places to discuss this issue.

But while I do suspect that liberal infighting contributes to the issue being difficult to discuss in general, I don’t think it’s the primary reason that it’s especially difficult at very liberal schools. At moderate schools, there are roughly even numbers of very and slightly liberal students. At hyper-liberal schools, very liberal students outnumber slightly liberal ones by roughly 6 to 1. While our ideology measurements are an imperfect proxy for opinion on this issue, I’d bet against numbers like that causing more liberal infighting.

Fear of social stigma

Okay, there’s research suggesting that college students often fear social sanction for speaking their minds. Even if hyper-liberal schools, which are all small liberal arts schools and half of which are all-women, have less disagreement of opinion, maybe what disagreement exists is met with more social stigma there. I don’t have any data that proves this isn’t a factor, and I suspect this has some effect, particularly on creating a baseline difficulty across a range of schools and contentious political issues.

But it’s probably not the whole story, or anywhere close to it. It can’t explain why conservative women report having an easier time discussing abortion or the 2024 presidential election at hyper-liberal schools than they do at moderate schools. It can’t explain why the presumably-apathetic students who haven’t thought much about their ideology have an easier time discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it can’t explain a relationship between administrative distrust and difficulty, which we’ll discuss momentarily. There seems to be a larger factor here.

Fear of administrative punishment

Another obvious possibility is that fear of administrative ire is silencing students. After all, there were more than a couple heavy-handed administrative crackdowns in response to the encampments. We have data on a question similar to this: In our survey, we ask how clear it is that an administration protects free speech on campus. Are students who distrust their administrations more likely to be uncomfortable discussing such a charged issue?

That’s very information-rich, but also busy. Here’s a simpler plot showing the same core trend:

Yes, emphatically. At the most liberal schools, students who think it’s not at all clear that their administration protects free speech on campus are 30 percentage points more likely to find the conflict difficult to discuss than those who think it’s extremely clear. (Looking just at liberal students at hyper-liberal schools, we see a similar result.) On the plot above, notice how the higher rows (where students trust the administration less) are darker (more difficulty): there’s a very strong relationship between distrust of one’s administration and difficulty discussing the conflict, especially at liberal schools. While we can’t prove that it’s causal, that result suggests that fear of the administration is a significant force in deterring discussion on this issue.

So what do students at hyper-liberal schools say about the topic? We ask students to share a moment where they felt they could not express their opinions on campus. When they feel they’re unable to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, do they talk about the administration?

“Whenever we discuss the ongoing conflict in Gaza, it’s under the assumption that if we go against administration, we are kicked out of the college.” (Barnard College)

“Administration just expelled two students over speaking out about the Israel-Palestine conflict.” (Seemingly for disrupting an Israeli history class, which, regardless of whether it justifies expulsion, isn’t protected speech.) (Barnard College)

“Not being able to say from the river to the sea without risk of being honor coded” (Wellesley College)

“The college has been very pro-Israel, this has led to a lot of censorship away from pro-Palestinian conversations” (Mount Holyoke College)

“The admin here is pretty pro-Israel so sometimes I’m worried about expressing my pro-Palestine opinions” (Smith College)

These should be treated as an illustration, not a representative sample or strong evidence: there are students who give other reasons for silence on the conflict, including fear of social repercussions, or no reason at all. That said, sentiments like the ones above are quite common.

So is this fear actually justified? Are administrations actually cracking down on liberal students or pro-Palestinian protestors especially aggressively at hyper-liberal schools? We don’t have data on that exact question in its entirety, but we do have data on the responses to the encampments, which seems like a reasonable proxy. Were they shut down more often at very liberal schools?

No. Encampments were more common at more liberal schools, but, when they happened, they were less likely to result in arrests or other police action. (This is the size of the red/yellow bar as a fraction of the whole bar.) Administrations at more liberal schools were less likely to punish students for encampments.

But what about punishment for speech generally? We also ask students whether they’ve been punished or threatened with punishment for expression on campus:

Generally, the more liberal the school, the less likely the students were to be disciplined or threatened for expression. Yes, college administrators are famously unkind towards student speech, but the administrations at hyper-liberal schools seem more lenient towards pro-Palestinian protestors than their counterparts at other schools. Liberal students at hyper-liberal schools are less trusting of their administration and more worried about discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even though they’re seemingly less likely to face punishment for pro-Palestinian protests there. While I certainly agree with their general distrust of college administrations, in this specific regard, it looks like this might be a case of many pro-Palestinian students at hyper-liberal schools being scared of their own shadows or having deeply distorted views of what free speech means. We should of course be appropriately cautious when reading into the data something very related to what it says, but that seems the most reasonable conclusion from the available evidence.

Conclusion

I see two useful warnings here. The first is the danger of scaring yourself into silence with an invented or exaggerated fear. Yes, the administrative onslaught against student expression is often real, fierce, and brutal. Yes, even when not officially punished, speaking your mind can have social repercussions. But, if you’re lucky enough to be in neither of those situations (or neither particularly severely), it’s easy to overestimate the danger you actually face. If you’re an ardently pro-Palestinian student at an overwhelmingly liberal school, you probably shouldn’t be more afraid to talk about the conflict than someone who holds the same opinion at a school with a slightly liberal student body and an administration possibly deeply hostile to your cause.

The second is more obvious: the general state of discourse on campuses is bad. At moderate schools, over half of students find it difficult to discuss many important issues. At very liberal schools, those with minority viewpoints face a similar situation. Part of the problem here is censorship, but not all of it. If we want to make progress on issues vital to our nation, we need to be willing to discuss them honestly even when doing so is difficult, uncomfortable, or worse.

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