I have a t-shirt that says “Free Speech Makes Free People,” which I received as a donor to FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression). Sometimes over the last few years I have worn the t-shirt out and about, often to the gym. When I have, I’ve received supportive comments and friendly looks, typically from men I’m pretty sure are far to my political right. This has sometimes made me a little uncomfortable, because I’m a true-blue liberal and always will be.
Over the last couple years, though, and especially since the Trump administration took office, it’s become clear that free speech may be Republican-coded on t-shirts, but it’s far from Republican-coded in practice. In fact, the arc of the last decade has seen steady attacks on free speech from the left and the right, but in very different ways. From the left, attacks have been from the bottom up, while from the Trump administration they have been from the top down. Regardless of the direction, we now see vanishingly little support for the kind of free speech that is guaranteed by our Constitution.
I originally joined FIRE in 2020 because, as a professor in a particularly progressive field, I felt the increasing hostility to free speech on campus. This was the sort of thing Greg Lukianoff wrote about in The Coddling of the American Mind. It was palpable on my own campus, the University of Southern California, and in the major professional organizations in my field, like the American Educational Research Association.
I could see the censoriousness growing from when I first arrived in graduate school (2006) all the way through my first decade in the academy. For instance, there was a growing, stultifying enforcement of language norms—words you were supposed to say or not say—and resistance to hearing even moderately diverse viewpoints. I’ll never forget when faculty protestors at our national conference tried to shout down an invited guest speaker—Secretary of Education Arne Duncan—as if his views were too far outside the mainstream to be heard in such a setting.
Conservative media loved to highlight the erosion of free speech on college campuses. Professional provocateurs would show up to cause a fight, and Fox would cover these efforts to stifle conservative views breathlessly. And, setting aside the provocations, there was some truth to these worries. Academics are indeed very liberal, and student- and faculty-led activism was creating an oppressive climate on campus for those who questioned rapidly evolving left-wing orthodoxies. But institutional Democrats mostly avoided the issue—rarely talking about these trends and largely avoiding legal efforts at the abrogation of free speech. From the left, then, the assault was mostly bottom up.
The first year of the second Trump administration has taken the opposite approach, with the administration bringing the weight of the federal government behind a top-down attack on speech rights, especially on college campuses. The most notable efforts have been to punish pro-Palestine protestors—especially those who are not U.S. citizens— seeking, for instance, to deport them for their current or future speech or beliefs. The administration has ironically weaponized free speech against universities, withholding federal funding from institutions that didn’t crack down enough on pro-Palestinian student protestors, or threatening them with removing their tax-exempt status. Institutions have buckled, censoring administrators and faculty for discussing gender identity issues in class.
