False. I’m a tenured full time faculty member and the government is not even close to the biggest threat. It’s other faculty, students, and administrators.
I keep quiet constantly out of fear of someone putting a target on my back. I’m a centrist, former democrat, and there are many many topics I would teach and research that I simply don’t out of fear.
You cannot compare this to faculty impulsively and stupidly celebrating Kirk’s death. I don’t think there should be sanctions for such celebrations but the government pales by comparison to the far more pervasive restrictions imposed by an ideological monoculture
Zero chance your numbers are anywhere near accurate... labeling a group as thought police, but then not including any mention of censorship in relation to covid... I read this post 3 times thinking this has to be a farce page based solely on the numbers cited from 2000 to 2024
See my other comment. This is based on counting these incidents from the right multiple times (per faculty member, per book pulled), when no such balanced attempt to count all the individuals who faced censorship from leftist speech repression is done.
No one said that exercising your rights is an easy and convenient privilege. You have to stand up for yourself if you want to keep them. Have any of these “silenced” professors been arrested? Or been fired or demoted because of what they said? Wake me when that happens.
Yet another week using bogus, blatantly dishonest statistics to claim that government censorship from the right is spiking.
Just continuing the dishonesty from your “the vibe in campus censorship” piece. From which comes this admission of how the dishonesty has been done.
“FIRE defends individual rights, therefore we count each scholar as an individual entry, resulting in 111 of the 151 entries recorded in 2025 so far — and we’ve only reviewed about a third of the titles on the list for removal.”
Wow, what a cheap, dishonest way to claim that censorship from the right is up relative to the left.
Almost all past FIRE reporting has been about incidents of censorship.
But now you claim that the removal of a particular book from a library is a separate attack on a specific *scholar*?!?!? 🙄
Please.
Are you *really* claiming that you have reviewed the entirety of all past FIRE reporting and verified you held it to the same standard of “individual” rights in your counts?
I would be extremely surprised to find that that is the case.
By that logic, does that mean you counted the individual students who planned to attend and were denied their right to access to a given speaker when a speaker was not allowed to speak?
Of course you did not make such an impossible count.
Of course If you did, the claims of “balance” in censorship attacks on students up through 2024 would be preposterous.
Do you truly not see the double-standard in counting and presenting the censorship incidents from each side?!?
So by your logic, had there been 300 members of the GMU faculty Senate that would have been 300 incidents of attacks from the right instead of 55 (or the *correct* view, which is ONE incident of a particularly disturbing attack)? 🙄
For the rest of us who don’t want to have to spend the time to review each and every prior FIRE incident case, can you show us your work, or tell us when the “policy” about each book counting as an individual instance of censorship was made FIRE’s practice? Does this go back to early in the organization’s founding? Because it sure smells like a way to put the thumb on the scale…
And/or you are not reporting that in fact you count attacks against students’ rights to be free from censorship by having speech denied to them differently from “scholars”.
Lies, damn lies and statistics I guess.
This counting of books removed as “incidents”, and of multiple faculty in a faculty senate each as separate “incidents”, is an indefensible double standard clearly done by motivated staff trying to show that the censorship on campus from the right and by the government right has been close to equal that from the left.
False. I’m a tenured full time faculty member and the government is not even close to the biggest threat. It’s other faculty, students, and administrators.
I keep quiet constantly out of fear of someone putting a target on my back. I’m a centrist, former democrat, and there are many many topics I would teach and research that I simply don’t out of fear.
You cannot compare this to faculty impulsively and stupidly celebrating Kirk’s death. I don’t think there should be sanctions for such celebrations but the government pales by comparison to the far more pervasive restrictions imposed by an ideological monoculture
Zero chance your numbers are anywhere near accurate... labeling a group as thought police, but then not including any mention of censorship in relation to covid... I read this post 3 times thinking this has to be a farce page based solely on the numbers cited from 2000 to 2024
See my other comment. This is based on counting these incidents from the right multiple times (per faculty member, per book pulled), when no such balanced attempt to count all the individuals who faced censorship from leftist speech repression is done.
No one said that exercising your rights is an easy and convenient privilege. You have to stand up for yourself if you want to keep them. Have any of these “silenced” professors been arrested? Or been fired or demoted because of what they said? Wake me when that happens.
No, the biggest problem no matter what the topic is that you believe there's a government. IT'S AN ORGANIZED CRIME RACKET.
Lol…burn! 🔥
Just fact, unfortunately.
Yet another week using bogus, blatantly dishonest statistics to claim that government censorship from the right is spiking.
Just continuing the dishonesty from your “the vibe in campus censorship” piece. From which comes this admission of how the dishonesty has been done.
“FIRE defends individual rights, therefore we count each scholar as an individual entry, resulting in 111 of the 151 entries recorded in 2025 so far — and we’ve only reviewed about a third of the titles on the list for removal.”
Wow, what a cheap, dishonest way to claim that censorship from the right is up relative to the left.
Almost all past FIRE reporting has been about incidents of censorship.
But now you claim that the removal of a particular book from a library is a separate attack on a specific *scholar*?!?!? 🙄
Please.
Are you *really* claiming that you have reviewed the entirety of all past FIRE reporting and verified you held it to the same standard of “individual” rights in your counts?
I would be extremely surprised to find that that is the case.
By that logic, does that mean you counted the individual students who planned to attend and were denied their right to access to a given speaker when a speaker was not allowed to speak?
Of course you did not make such an impossible count.
Of course If you did, the claims of “balance” in censorship attacks on students up through 2024 would be preposterous.
Do you truly not see the double-standard in counting and presenting the censorship incidents from each side?!?
So by your logic, had there been 300 members of the GMU faculty Senate that would have been 300 incidents of attacks from the right instead of 55 (or the *correct* view, which is ONE incident of a particularly disturbing attack)? 🙄
For the rest of us who don’t want to have to spend the time to review each and every prior FIRE incident case, can you show us your work, or tell us when the “policy” about each book counting as an individual instance of censorship was made FIRE’s practice? Does this go back to early in the organization’s founding? Because it sure smells like a way to put the thumb on the scale…
And/or you are not reporting that in fact you count attacks against students’ rights to be free from censorship by having speech denied to them differently from “scholars”.
Lies, damn lies and statistics I guess.
This counting of books removed as “incidents”, and of multiple faculty in a faculty senate each as separate “incidents”, is an indefensible double standard clearly done by motivated staff trying to show that the censorship on campus from the right and by the government right has been close to equal that from the left.
Suddenly the charlatans are credible?! It’s as if the effect had no cause!