Free speech can’t be engineered or outsourced to apps
American universities insist they are committed to free expression. Many now point to “dialogue-across-differences” programs and AI-mediated conversations as proof. Students are trained to listen respectfully, disagree productively, and engage across differences.
I see these initiatives up close: I sit in faculty meetings where they are rolled out, watch students navigate them in real time, and hear privately what they are reluctant to say publicly. And the climate for speech on campus continues to deteriorate.
According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings, most American colleges now earn failing marks for speech climate. Of the 257 institutions surveyed, 166 received an F, and only 11 earned a C or higher. The national average score — 58.63 out of 100 — would itself be a failing grade in most classrooms. Student attitudes have hardened as well: Majorities now oppose allowing controversial speakers from across the political spectrum.
Whatever these initiatives are meant to accomplish, the broader data suggest they are not reversing the decline in speech climate.
The problem is not that students lack conversational skills. In my classrooms, students are thoughtful, capable, and often eager to engage. What they lack is confidence the institution will protect them when their viewpoints fall outside prevailing norms. Universities increasingly treat speech as something to be managed rather than protected, and students understand that distinction intuitively.
The answer to a failing speech climate is not better software. It is better leadership — exercised in real spaces, among real people, facing real disagreement, with real conviction.
A recent essay by Hollis Robbins, professor of English at the University of Utah and former dean of humanities there, in the Chronicle of Higher Education helps clarify what is going wrong. In “The Noxiousness of Civic-Discourse Platforms,” Robbins examines the design of popular civic-discourse platforms that require students to disclose their positions on controversial issues, rate their confidence in those views, and participate in moderated dialogues that are peer-evaluated and archived.
The stated goal is openness. The effect is closer to surveillance.
Platforms like Sway—already in use on at least 77 campuses and backed in part by U.S. intelligence community funding—and Dialogues typically work by prompting students to enter their views on contested topics such as abortion, immigration, and policing, then matching them with peers who hold opposing positions for structured online exchanges. What was once a casual conversation becomes part of a permanent record. Beliefs are transformed into data — recorded, scored, and retained. Discretion is limited, and opting out often comes with its own costs. Over time, institutions accumulate detailed records of what students say, how confidently they say it, and how others judge them for it.
That reality shapes behavior long before anyone logs on.
For much of modern higher education, liberal learning rested on a simple norm: Students could explore ideas without being defined by them. They could be uncertain, incomplete, or undecided. That space for intellectual risk was not incidental. It was essential.
Many contemporary discourse initiatives narrow that space. When students are asked to quantify their agreement, are sorted into opposing camps, and evaluated on their expression of belief, they learn quickly that speech is consequential. In such environments, caution is not cowardice. It is rational behavior — and it is one I see play out semester after semester.
This helps explain a pattern FIRE has documented repeatedly: Students report growing reluctance to speak openly, even as universities expand programming supposedly designed to encourage it.
Not all discourse initiatives make these mistakes. Programs that operate in person rather than through digital platforms, and that follow the Chatham House Rule — where participants can share ideas but not attribute them — preserve the exploratory space that liberal learning requires. FIRE’s own Let’s Talk program takes this approach: facilitating face-to-face conversations where what is said in the room stays in the room, and where no algorithm records or scores participants’ beliefs.
These distinctions matter. A conversation governed by discretion and conducted in person is fundamentally different from one where beliefs become data points in a permanent file. The former creates conditions for genuine exploration; the latter creates incentives for performance.
But many platforms gaining traction on campuses abandon both principles. They move dialogue onto screens, mediate it through algorithms, and treat transparency as an unqualified good — missing that discretion and physical presence are often what make honest inquiry possible.
What students need is not another platform. They need institutions willing to say, clearly and publicly, that the expression of unpopular ideas is not a problem to be solved but a condition of learning itself.
The deeper failure is institutional.
As FIRE has warned, free speech is increasingly treated as a conditional privilege rather than a foundational principle — defended when convenient, constrained when controversial. Universities are often eager to endorse free expression in theory, but hesitant to defend it when speech provokes outrage, reputational risk, or political pressure.
Many dialogue platforms reflect this same logic. They create controlled spaces for managed disagreement while leaving intact — or even reinforcing — the broader culture of fear surrounding unscripted speech. They teach students how to talk without assuring them that they will be protected when they do.
Worse, the turn toward virtual dialogue sidesteps the real challenge universities face: building pluralism where people actually live and learn together.
Free speech is not learned in apps or simulations. It is learned in dorm rooms, dining halls, classrooms, and student organizations — places where people with genuinely different backgrounds, beliefs, and temperaments must coexist. Anyone who teaches knows this. Online debates cannot substitute for the daily work of navigating disagreement face to face.
What universities increasingly avoid is the harder work of governing pluralistic communities. Residential life, dining halls, and classrooms are where disagreements actually surface — often awkwardly, sometimes painfully. Fostering such spaces requires clear expectations, consistent enforcement of viewpoint-neutral policies, and administrators willing to defend expressive rights when doing so is uncomfortable. No platform can substitute for that kind of leadership.
Universities cannot outsource that responsibility.
The College Free Speech Rankings point to another troubling shift consistent with this analysis. A record one in three students now say that using violence to stop a campus speech can sometimes be justified. Growing numbers say that shouting down speakers or disrupting events is acceptable. This is not merely a breakdown of etiquette. It reflects a deeper confusion about what universities are for and what free speech demands of a community committed to learning.
Platforms that prioritize the expression of belief over the development of judgment do little to reverse this trend. They adapt to the erosion of free-speech norms instead of resisting it.
Universities already know how to cultivate the habits free societies require. Faculty do it every day through serious coursework, evidence-based argument, and disciplined disagreement. That work is slower and harder to quantify. It does not produce dashboards. But it does produce judgment.
Free speech cannot survive as a managed outcome. It cannot be reduced to metrics or mediated by machines. And it will not be restored by tools designed to make disagreement frictionless.
What students need is not another platform. They need institutions willing to say, clearly and publicly, that the expression of unpopular ideas is not a problem to be solved but a condition of learning itself. They need faculty who model disagreement as a scholarly practice. And they need administrators who will defend them when the cost of doing so is real.
The answer to a failing speech climate is not better software. It is better leadership — exercised in real spaces, among real people, facing real disagreement, with real conviction.
 | A guest post by
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