“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 has been close to equal that from the left.
My suspicion is that there's two key factors going on here.
1. Culture war exhaustion. Regardless of one's position on any of these 6 hot button topics, there's an awareness that a prominent guest speaker speaking on it is likely to bring a lot of chaos and disruption and heated divisions to their college. Likely a lot of students simply don't want *the fallout* from people speaking on these topics, regardless of their position on the topic itself.
2. "What's good for the goose is good for the gander." Many conservatives feel like being free speech absolutists just leads to them getting the worst of both worlds - their political rivals get to take advantage of their free speech principles while many of their political rivals *also* get to shut down unwanted conservative speech.
An analogy I would use here is a game of sports. Think of uniform free speech absolutism being similar to a ref consistently calling the game with a lot of leeway for both teams - only the most flagrant of violations get penalized. Now, think of Team A enjoying such leeway while the other team (Team B) has the rulebook called very strictly on them. This is obviously to Team B's disadvantage, regardless of how the players feel about how strictly the rules should be followed in an universal sense. "If they refuse to not be strict on our team, then we need to convince the refs to be strict on *both* teams."
Sadly, I think the fight for free speech is going to get increasingly hard in the years to come, as both of the factors I mentioned will play on the minds of many conservative and right-leaning people.
I think this is close to the mark. It's an understandable but cynical reaction to Leftist domination of public discourse. Universities were *supposed to be* the "marketplace of ideas" with free and fair competition of ideas and open dialog. But we've seen that this is clearly not true, and Leftist ideologues have the most blood on their hands.
And of course this goes far beyond universities. For example, trans advocates *physically* assaulted people at a talk at a Seattle Public Library.
So the natural reaction is, well, if open dialog is fake and these spaces are captured, then it's "game on" for opposing viewpoints. Discourse is done, and we're going back to fighting our battles through ballots and courts (best case) or actual physical violence (worst case).
It seems titles were targeted - many inappropriately, sure. The “scholar” was not the target. Not knowing or caring for any of the titles, I’m agnostic on the point if the Academy ever needed them at all. Maybe, maybe not. To take this further, shouldn’t the Academy be required to purchase all publications for all “scholars”, otherwise aren’t they targeting said “scholars” by NOT having a copy of their work?
“A similar incident recently took place at George Mason University, where all 55 members of the faculty senate have been placed under investigation by the federal government for drafting a resolution in support for Gregory Washington, the university’s president, who is also under federal investigation for allowing the university to allegedly engage in discriminatory diversity programs.”
Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
I was unaware of all of this.
I am thrilled that the university president is under investigation for the discriminatory diversity programs.
But I am deeply disturbed about the claim about the faculty senate investigation.
That said, the link you supplied for the latter is broken; hopefully you can fix it.
So now they're all Diogenes with a hammer looking for a nail, and the nail that sticks out will get hammered down. Authoritarian systems work by creating a sufficient climate of fear that people police themselves; the thought police cometh. There is nothing either liberal or conservative in what is happening.
“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 has been close to equal that from the left.
My suspicion is that there's two key factors going on here.
1. Culture war exhaustion. Regardless of one's position on any of these 6 hot button topics, there's an awareness that a prominent guest speaker speaking on it is likely to bring a lot of chaos and disruption and heated divisions to their college. Likely a lot of students simply don't want *the fallout* from people speaking on these topics, regardless of their position on the topic itself.
2. "What's good for the goose is good for the gander." Many conservatives feel like being free speech absolutists just leads to them getting the worst of both worlds - their political rivals get to take advantage of their free speech principles while many of their political rivals *also* get to shut down unwanted conservative speech.
An analogy I would use here is a game of sports. Think of uniform free speech absolutism being similar to a ref consistently calling the game with a lot of leeway for both teams - only the most flagrant of violations get penalized. Now, think of Team A enjoying such leeway while the other team (Team B) has the rulebook called very strictly on them. This is obviously to Team B's disadvantage, regardless of how the players feel about how strictly the rules should be followed in an universal sense. "If they refuse to not be strict on our team, then we need to convince the refs to be strict on *both* teams."
Sadly, I think the fight for free speech is going to get increasingly hard in the years to come, as both of the factors I mentioned will play on the minds of many conservative and right-leaning people.
I think this is close to the mark. It's an understandable but cynical reaction to Leftist domination of public discourse. Universities were *supposed to be* the "marketplace of ideas" with free and fair competition of ideas and open dialog. But we've seen that this is clearly not true, and Leftist ideologues have the most blood on their hands.
And of course this goes far beyond universities. For example, trans advocates *physically* assaulted people at a talk at a Seattle Public Library.
So the natural reaction is, well, if open dialog is fake and these spaces are captured, then it's "game on" for opposing viewpoints. Discourse is done, and we're going back to fighting our battles through ballots and courts (best case) or actual physical violence (worst case).
It seems titles were targeted - many inappropriately, sure. The “scholar” was not the target. Not knowing or caring for any of the titles, I’m agnostic on the point if the Academy ever needed them at all. Maybe, maybe not. To take this further, shouldn’t the Academy be required to purchase all publications for all “scholars”, otherwise aren’t they targeting said “scholars” by NOT having a copy of their work?
Given the dishonest counting methodology used to make its points, the title of this piece really should have been:
“The ‘vibe’ shift in FIRE reporting methodology and spin about campus censorship.”
“A similar incident recently took place at George Mason University, where all 55 members of the faculty senate have been placed under investigation by the federal government for drafting a resolution in support for Gregory Washington, the university’s president, who is also under federal investigation for allowing the university to allegedly engage in discriminatory diversity programs.”
Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
I was unaware of all of this.
I am thrilled that the university president is under investigation for the discriminatory diversity programs.
But I am deeply disturbed about the claim about the faculty senate investigation.
That said, the link you supplied for the latter is broken; hopefully you can fix it.
So now they're all Diogenes with a hammer looking for a nail, and the nail that sticks out will get hammered down. Authoritarian systems work by creating a sufficient climate of fear that people police themselves; the thought police cometh. There is nothing either liberal or conservative in what is happening.
are there enough conservative students for these data to matter, or is it like N=10
Over 2300 conservative students in 2020, and more in subsequent years.