In September 2021, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences disinvited University of Chicago Associate Professor of Geophysics Dorian Abbot from delivering the prestigious John Carlson Lecture on October 21 of that year. Dr. Abbot cowrote a Newsweek op-ed that proposed prioritizing merit, fairness, and equality in college admissions over diversity, equity, and inclusion. Soon after the piece was published, a Twitter mob branded Professor Abbot as a racist and urged MIT to rescind its invitation.

The MIT administration made the wrong call here. Dr. Abbot was invited on the basis of his novel theories about the climates of exoplanets, which fulfilled the John Carlson Lecture’s aim to communicate “exciting new results in climate science to the general public.” His opinions about college admissions were fully protected by academic freedom and had no bearing on his qualifications to deliver the lecture.

MIT’s loss became Princeton’s gain. Robert George, director of Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, jumped at the chance to host Professor Abbot’s presentation on October 21, 2021, calling MIT’s decision “chilling to academic freedom and free speech.” Many students from outside geophysics and planetary sciences attended the lecture, eager to hear from a professor whose views are considered out of bounds at America’s leading university for science, mathematics, and engineering.

When Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences disinvited Dorian Abbot, Princeton’s Robert George jumped at the chance to host Professor Abbot’s presentation on October 21, 2021, calling MIT’s decision “chilling to academic freedom and free speech.”

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Will it take injuries, hospitalizations, or something worse for them to stop turning a blind eye—or even tacitly condoning—the aggression we’re seeing from anti-free speech students?

In May, members of Congress heard a first-hand account of today’s academic dangers from former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines, who was mobbed by protestors and trapped in a room for hours after giving a lecture at San Francisco State University (SFSU) in April. She recounted hearing protestors outside the room say, “you were asking for this” and “she doesn’t get to go home safely.”

A top SFSU administrator said she was proud of these students. The university president applauded them.

The attack on Ms. Gaines was just one of many recent events that have devolved into violence or teetered on the brink of it. Michael Knowles was burned in effigy at the University of Pittsburgh, where someone also set off an incendiary device. When Matt Walsh spoke at the University of Iowa, someone spilled marbles all over the floor at one of the exits. Protesters smashed windows when Charlie Kirk visited the University of California, Davis. Visits by James Lindsay and Alex Stein to Pennsylvania State University were postponed indefinitely due to security concerns after an event featuring Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes was canceled last fall due to protests that turned violent.

And we should not forget Allison Stanger, who was hospitalized after she and Charles Murray were assaulted by protestors at Middlebury College in 2017.

The reactions to these speakers are antithetical to the very nature of academia, which should provide a forum for free and open discourse and inquiry. That is not possible under threat of violence. As Ms. Gaines concluded in her testimony, “Free speech suffers when university administrators do not condemn violence and kidnapping on their campus. It’s chilled when administrators do not adequately prepare for and protect the safety of their speakers, whether liberal or conservative.”

Students who shout down or violently protest guest speakers should be disciplined simply for disrupting the function of their college or university. But if defending the integrity of their institutions is not reason enough for administrators, then they should discipline students because it is only a matter of time before someone is seriously injured, or worse.

Campus leaders need to recognize that many of the students who seek to disrupt guest lectures are motivated by a belief that words are harmful, or even violent, and make people unsafe. In a recent survey of students in the University of Wisconsin System, 37% of respondents answered “quite a bit” or “a great deal” when asked how much harm they think people who express offensive views cause. Three out of ten said the same when asked if expressing offensive views could be seen as an “act of violence toward vulnerable people.”

Students expressed these sorts of views during many of the shout-downs that took place this past academic year.

When Ann Coulter was repeatedly interrupted until she gave up trying to speak at Cornell University last fall, one of the protesters yelled, “your words are violence.” A student at Northwestern University suggested that hosting James Lindsay puts students in “harm’s way” and asked, “When does concern for student safety exceed the institution’s fetish for unrestricted speech?”

Students who criticized the Stanford University administration for apologizing to Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan called on it to state “unequivocal support for the dignity and safety of trans and queer students.” After Riley Gaines visited SFSU, one student said, “Trans students don’t feel supported by the university right now, they don’t feel safe.”

If students believe that words are violence, and that speech threatens their safety, is it any wonder that real violence has erupted when an allegedly controversial speaker visits their campus?

In fact, many students seem to think that a violent response is justifiable. In the Buckley Institute’s 2022 student survey, 44% of respondents said it is sometimes acceptable to shout down a speaker, while 41% said that violence could be justified to prevent someone from “using hate speech or making racially charged comments.”

To make matters worse, academic administrators often accept the idea that words can cause harm. See, for example, Stanford Law School Associate Dean Tirien Steinbach, who said that the campus “doesn’t always feel safe” and referred to speech “that feels harmful” before asking, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

SFSU President Lynn Mahoney said the Riley Gaines event was “deeply traumatic for many in our trans and LGBTQ+ communities,” while barely acknowledging what happened to Ms. Gaines, calling it a “disturbance after the event concluded.”

Recently, there have been signs that administrators might be ready to do something about this mounting aggression. Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez wrote a ten-page letter defending free expression. Cornell President Martha Pollack turned down a student request to mandate trigger warnings and announced that the next academic year will be devoted to free expression. The University of Pittsburgh’s provost has announced a “Year of Discourse and Dialogue.”

These efforts are needed. But academic administrators must also take decisive action against those who disrupt and shut down campus events that they view as harmful. If administrators do not punish this behavior with severe consequences, they are risking the safety of their campus communities and their guests.

This post appeared on Minding The Campus on June 2, 2023.

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There are certain truths of American political life that antedate even the Founding and are as important for our age as they were for ages past. Among these are that demagogues hold most sway over the ignorant, that a free people must be an informed people, and that representative democracy requires widespread education to flourish. A self-governing people cannot be a foolish, deluded, or benighted people, else it will soon lose its liberty. For these reasons, Americans must become passionate learners, fearless truth-seekers, and searching critics in order to take up the responsibilities of citizenship and render themselves immune to the manipulations of opportunists and timeservers.

Universities are indispensable for a free and prosperous society. They are the engine that drives both scientific and social progress. They educate students for career and responsible citizenship and habituate them to self-discovery and the pursuit of truth. Their mission depends on a campus culture of free expression and intellectual diversity. Unless teachers, students, and researchers can inquire and speak freely and fearlessly, innovation will stall, questions will be left unasked and unanswered, and students will be ill-prepared for life, career, community, and citizenship. 

But we learn in story after story, year upon year, that colleges and universities have lost their way. Instead of encouraging students to explore different lines of intellectual inquiry and equipping them for the rough-and-tumble of a vibrant democracy, too many institutions seem to be training them for lives as informers, inquisitors, and isolated, distrustful individuals. Rather than teaching students how to engage productively with challenging new ideas, far too many colleges and universities build cozy bubbles in which only comfortable orthodoxies are permitted. They foster large, expensive bureaucracies to police infractions of vague (and often extralegal, if not outright illegal) rules against expressing ideas that someone might find offensive.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) seeks to hold American colleges and universities accountable to their missions. Progress depends on the freedom to pursue new ideas. Self-discovery requires uninhibited exploration of life’s timeless questions. Education for citizenship in a liberal democratic republic necessarily involves opening ourselves to all the perspectives we might encounter in the community at large, even silly and dangerous ones, so that we are prepared to live and negotiate with all our fellow citizens. All of this requires free expression, which is why the United States Supreme Court has so roundly affirmed, protected, and over time, extended our rights to that core freedom. American universities, of all institutions, should not be the ones to curtail it.  

ACTA now provides a blueprint to help higher education regain and live by this core principle. The ACTA Gold Standard for Freedom of Expression provides clear guidance for institutions to create a culture of free thought on their campuses. Steps ranging from adopting new institutional guidelines, to creating new on-campus initiatives, to eliminating abusive and unconstitutional rules can help colleges and universities reclaim their place as leaders within our liberal democracy. 

For more information, visit our Campus Freedom Initiative page here.

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Mr. Hartman argued that only rarely are a school’s students or faculty silenced. Tell that to Middlebury College professor Allison Stanger, who still suffers from neck injuries received when she attempted to hold a discussion with Charles Murray on campus. Or Evergreen State College professor Bret Weinstein, who refused to leave campus as asked by students of color; the president ordered the campus police to stand down when an angry crowd of students grew threatening. Mr. Weinstein’s saga ended with his resignation and a cash settlement from Evergreen.

President Barack Obama was sufficiently troubled by the threats to campus speech to scold students and faculty at Rutgers University for discouraging Condoleezza Rice from speaking, and he admonished graduates at Howard University to hear out opposing viewpoints. To remedy the problem, we must recognize it.

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Disinvitation season is upon us.

One recent example of this phenomenon occurred at Bethune-Cookman University in Florida, when Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rose to deliver her address at the university’s spring commencement. Secretary DeVos’s address was greeted with graduates standing and turning their backs to her. The speech was interrupted repeatedly by boos and jeers, and several students had to be removed from the hall for their interventions. University President Edison Jackson eventually implored the graduates to behave more respectfully, warning the students: “If this behavior continues, your degrees will be mailed to you.”

Sadly, Secretary DeVos’s treatment is just the latest example of the chilly reception speakers with contrasting views receive on many American college campuses. Sadly, no commencement season is complete without some speaker being shouted down, disinvited, or voluntarily withdrawing because some faculty and students cannot abide their deviations from campus orthodoxy. In 2009, President Barack Obama created controversy when he agreed to give the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution, given his pro-choice views. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stood down from a speech she was invited to give at the 2014 Rutgers University spring commencement, after the invitation sparked student protests. Even comedian and liberal firebrand Bill Maher faced blowback when he was invited to speak at UC–Berkeley’s fall commencement in December 2014.

As these examples show, calls for censorship cross partisan and ideological divides. The impulse to retreat from or silence opposing views is contrary to the spirit of intellectual inquiry that should be at the heart of higher education. A person that never encounters opposing views cannot successfully make compelling, reasonable arguments supporting his or her own views. Universities, students, and all people should follow the wise counsel of President Thomas Jefferson, who wrote of the University of Virginia that: “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

Or, as President Barack Obama put it at the spring commencement of Howard University, another historically black institution, “. . . don’t try to shut folks out, don’t try to shut them down, no matter how much you might disagree with them . . . Listen. Engage. If the other side has a point, learn from them. If they’re wrong, rebut them. Teach them. Beat them on the battlefield of ideas.” 

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