Will free expression make a comeback at Haverford College?

Once a beacon of principled protest, Haverford has drifted astray. But proposed changes could restore a lost legacy.

Haverford students participate in a protest against the war in Vietnam. (Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections / Author Unknown)

One of the oldest and most respected liberal arts institutions in America, Haverford College has a long history of principled protest — from its abolitionist Quaker founders to the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 20th century. In recent years, that tradition has sadly curdled into a culture of censorship. But a new free-speech committee plans to restore this lost legacy.

In the 1960s, Haverford students joined the Free Speech Movement launched at UC Berkeley, and, bucking the national trend at the time, found themselves aided by their administrators. Haverford even chartered buses so students could attend anti-Vietnam War protests around the country.

But Haverford has in recent years developed one of the most restrictive campus speech climates in the country. The college has plummeted in FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings, landing 220th out of 251 schools in terms of how comfortable students are in expressing their ideas. Making matters worse, Haverford has taken the radical step of codifying its own decline. In a 2021 overhaul of its Honor Code, the college allowed the Honor Council to put students on trial for their political opinions. FIRE named it “Speech Code of the Month” and urged President Wendy Raymond to reject the changes. She did not.

Four years later, the tide is finally turning.

On July 9, 2025, Haverford’s Ad Hoc Committee on Freedom of Expression, Learning, and Community publicly released its final report, marking a pivotal course correction. The committee said the school’s Social Honor Code “is overly proscriptive and therefore restricts expressive freedom,” inferring that, when the code was written, “students were trying to legislate power dynamics between individuals based on a broader perception of societal imbalances and pursuit of social justice.” The committee criticized the code’s intrusion into interpersonal relationships and enforcement of ideological conformity, contributing to “a climate of silencing non-dominant viewpoints” and stifling “deeper learning and dialogue.”

The committee got it exactly right.

At Haverford — where liberals currently outnumber conservatives six-to-one — social justice is a broadly shared value. In 2021, that value motivated an egregiously censorious speech code. Now, nudged by news headlines in which the federal government has sought to effectively nationalize a private university and routinely undermines the First Amendment, Haverford seems to have rediscovered the importance of free speech.

As former ACLU Executive Director Ira Glasser famously warned, “Speech restrictions are like poison gas. You see a bad speaker out there, and you don’t wanna listen to him or her anymore. So you got this poison gas and you say, ‘I’m gonna spray him with it!’ And then the wind shifts. And pretty soon, the gas blows back on you.”

Glasser added: “And so, free speech is a kind of insurance policy. And the price you pay for that insurance policy is you gotta listen to bad people.”

Haverford’s committee deserves credit for recognizing the absolute necessity of a strong free speech culture to a liberal arts education. Notably, the committee affirmed the importance of an open marketplace of ideas in carrying out Haverford’s educational mission, called on President Raymond to adopt an institutional statement supporting free expression, and recommended greater schoolwide investment in civil discourse programming. Perhaps most significantly, the committee called for revisions to the Social Honor Code. These changes could improve Haverford’s “red light” rating in FIRE’s Spotlight Database of speech codes as well as raise the college’s standing in our College Free Speech Rankings.

Last December, FIRE sent the committee a letter offering resources and support as they reviewed Haverford’s speech climate and policies. The committee subsequently cited FIRE’s publicly available policy guidance on acceptable time, place, and manner restrictions in its final report. And the college’s new “Interim Policy on Expressive Freedom and Responsibility” passed our Policy Reform team’s review with flying colors. We encourage Haverford to make this policy permanent.

In addition to harnessing FIRE’s insights, the committee turned to students, faculty, staff, and alumni for feedback. And even before the committee was formed, a group of students and alumni made their concerns clear with The New Kronstadt (an online magazine I created through FIRE’s Campus Scholars Program), named after the Kronstadt Rebellion in which socialist sailors in the early Soviet Union demanded free speech and other civil liberties. Vladimir Lenin didn’t take kindly to these demands and ordered the sailors slaughtered. Soviet troops massacred the rebels, illustrating how sometimes the most brutal form of censorship comes from within shared communities.

Quite often, movements rooted in moral causes attract idealists, and idealists tend to crave clarity. Demanding conformity then becomes a way of reducing ambiguity in a morally messy world. But as Haverford alumnus and aspiring archivist Nicholas Lasinsky wrote in an op-ed for The New Kronstadt, “The world is better when we embrace the humility of uncertainty — when we are willing to listen to others, debate them, work to understand them — no matter how immovable our current beliefs feel. This is a fundamental step in any journey to understanding a topic, and a fundamental step of education.”

Haverford seems poised to take that step again. As a Haverford alum and FIRE staffer, I’m proud to see my alma mater return to its pro-free speech roots. The work I do every day to defend free expression is shaped by the values, people, and intellectual traditions I came to know at Haverford.

This summer, I attended the Colorado Conference on Civic Discourse to facilitate a workshop titled “Let’s Talk: Student Civil Discourse.” The keynote conversation featured Cornel West, a visiting professor at Haverford in the late 1970s and early 1980s and a frequent guest speaker on campus ever since. After watching West, a prominent left-wing defender of free thought and expression, engage in civil discourse with his friend and longtime sparring partner, the conservative legal scholar Robert P. George, I had a chance to speak with West. His face lit up when he heard I’d studied at Haverford. He remembered my old English professor and Haverford’s former president, Kimberly Benston, as a brilliant scholar of the often-censored writers Ralph Ellison and Amiri Baraka. Reflecting on how those authors shaped us, we lingered on the final line of Ellison’s Invisible Man: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

On a deeper level, Ellison’s Invisible Man is not only the story of one nameless Black man navigating 1940s America, but a meditation on the universal struggle for self-definition and human dignity — and the necessity of free speech to achieve it. For when any honest, unfiltered voice is heard, it can speak beyond identity and viewpoint, breaking a silence we may not know we shared. Finding the courage to speak is our shared human condition.

This month, Haverford found its voice again — and called for its administrators to reaffirm the right of its community to speak freely. Now, college leadership must answer. President Raymond must ensure the committee’s words do not ring hollow and take action to ensure the Social Honor Code is revised to permit free speech. The college should also adopt an institutional statement on free expression and implement the cultural investments and pedagogical programming the committee prescribed. If the committee’s recommendations take hold, a frequent Quaker refrain and campus ideal can resonate with renewed promise: “Let your life speak.”