More than a dozen college presidents have signed on to a new campaign to bolster free speech on their campuses.
The 13 leaders — hailing from Cornell, Duke, and Rutgers Universities, to name a few — are pledging to “urgently spotlight, uplift, and re-emphasize” free speech and academic freedom over the next academic year, they announced Tuesday. The presidents, who are planning what they call “urgent action,” are mostly from private colleges.
At DePauw University and Rollins College, for instance, freedom of expression will be the focus of upcoming presidential speeches at convocations. This fall, every first-year and transfer student at James Madison University will take part in “free-expression training.” And South Carolina’s Benedict College is branding its effort with a hashtag — “#perspective” — a slogan that may even end up on some T-shirts.
The campaign, which the presidents are calling the “Campus Call for Free Expression,” is the most-recent indication of college presidents’ increasingly forceful defense of free-speech principles. It follows other efforts like the Champions of Higher Education, a group of 100 former college presidents coordinated by PEN America, in collaboration with Campus Compact, to advocate for free expression. At the same time, many presidents have become cautious in recent years about tackling hot-button issues for fear of blowback. Others have been notably quiet as state governments have taken heavier hands in matters typically left up to academics.
“There is cause to be concerned,” said Lori S. White, president of DePauw. Her campus will be meticulously walking new students through its value statement about freedom of expression during orientation, she said.
The project started about 18 months ago, said Rajiv Vinnakota, president of the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, a civic-education nonprofit that organized the campaign. At the time, he said a small number of “highly charged campus incidents” were getting lots of attention. Then came high-profile free-speech controversies at places like Stanford, Hamline, and Cornell Universities.
The presidents, Vinnakota said, felt like “collective action and collective voice was missing.”
Though free-speech controversies are nothing new in higher ed, recent data were another motivator for the group of campus leaders. The Knight Foundation, which is funding the effort, commissioned a survey in 2022 that found opinions among Americans, including undergraduates, about the importance of the First Amendment differ wildly along political and racial lines. Students were also increasingly in favor of imposing campus restrictions on speech that targets minority groups.
Meanwhile, attempts to penalize campus speech have accelerated over the past decade, according to a report released earlier this year by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The annual number of attempts to sanction scholars has increased dramatically over time, the report says, from four in 2000 to 145 in 2022. More than a third of attempts were initiated by undergraduates, the report says.
Even among the presidents participating in the campaign, though, there is disagreement over why now is the right moment to recommit to academic freedom. Some are concerned about students and faculty members self-censoring. Others, like Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, are more wary of “right-wing power brokers that are trying to take freedom of expression away from teachers, professors, and libraries.”
Uniting them all, Roth said, is the idea that “you learn by finding ways of having good conversations with people who don’t agree with you. And that’s not so easy these days.”
