Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.
A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.
But that version of the story, at best, is a half-truth. Rieder wasn’t simply criticized for “talking about race” — as FIRE has noted elsewhere, three students filed Title IX complaints after Reider quoted the N-word as part of a song lyric. Rieder then defended his use of the slur by telling students that some Black people had “given him permission” to use it, according to a Columbia University student publication. (Rieder says that account is false.) After Barnard determined not to punish Rieder for using the expression, the university declined to offer the course the following semester; the chair of the sociology department cited negative media coverage. (The controversy was covered by the New York Post, among other outlets.) But after the pause, Rieder’s course was reinstated, now with added lessons on “wokeness” and “free expression.”
As student protesters rock campuses, FIRE has stepped into the spotlight as a research and advocacy organization devoted to protecting free speech. FIRE and its president, Greg Lukianoff, have been profiled by many outlets in recent months, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. But none of those publications audited FIRE’s data. A careful analysis reveals that Rieder’s noncensorship is one of many instances of speech suppression that FIRE’s report misrepresents. These range from misleading readers about the specifics of the speech under fire to, arguably, falsifying instances of censorship.
FIRE’s flagship rankings are calculated using three components: a survey of college students, FIRE’s assessment of colleges’ written policies on student speech, and FIRE’s internal database of free-speech suppression on campuses. The first two items have faced criticism — the survey is sent to a tiny minority of U.S. colleges, and FIRE’s grades on university speech codes are arbitrary. But it is the final component — FIRE’s internal database of speech suppression — that raises the most serious concerns.
The most immediate problem with FIRE’s data is poor quality control. There are numerous instances of mislabeled free-speech violations. For example, Timothy Farage was a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas when he was criticized for a homophobic tweet, but FIRE labeled him as being a professor at UT Austin. (In a separate publication, FIRE correctly noted Farage taught at UT Dallas.) Fawzia Afzal-Khan was demoted from the position of director of the gender, sexuality, and women’s studies program at Montclair State University in 2017 — not, as FIRE claims, in 2021. That matters, because events more than four years old are not supposed to be counted in FIRE’s free-speech rankings, per FIRE’s methodology.
Many of the instances of censorship included in FIRE’s reports are still being adjudicated or are otherwise difficult to parse.
More serious are the cases where FIRE outright fabricates censorship. In July 2020, the geneticist Spencer Wells spurred controversy by tweeting that Israel should be bombed until “the sand turns to glass.” FIRE claims in its dataset that Wells’s contract with UT Austin was “likely not renewed” due to those tweets. But Wells’s contract had expired in May of that year, a month before the controversy occurred. It was not possible that, as FIRE put it, he was “terminated” for his speech. (In response to written questions, a representative from FIRE stated that “the timing of the nonrenewal is suspicious.”)
Another example: FIRE alleges that Ann Bartow, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, was fired for speech critical of the university. But an arbitrator found that Bartow had, among other things, failed to design and teach three courses as required in her contract. The arbitrator never mentioned speech as an issue in Bartow’s firing — nor had Bartow said anything particularly controversial.
FIRE states that each case of possible censorship is diligently reviewed before it is included in their databases. “To verify the details of each incident, we rely on information provided by every person involved who’s willing to respond publicly. When there are competing, credible accounts, our research team consults with the litigation and campus rights-advocacy departments within FIRE.” But many of the instances of censorship included in FIRE’s reports are still being adjudicated or are otherwise difficult to parse. Take, for example, Claremont McKenna College’s alleged censorship of three professors who used the N-word in class. FIRE alleges that one professor was fired, another was removed from teaching courses, and a third was censored by the college.
Contentious letters sent between FIRE and the college illustrate that the disputes were hotly contested, but three things are clear. The first professor was not fired; she had been informed months before the incident that she would likely not be reappointed to her post. The second professor was never removed from teaching any courses. And the third professor even complained to FIRE that the organization had misrepresented what happened.
In attempting to quantify the amount of censorship on certain campuses, FIRE must make editorial decisions about what does and does not count as censorship. Is it censorship to punish a professor who harasses students outside of class? FIRE says so; it penalized the University of Notre Dame after the university terminated a postdoctoral fellow who commented on a Chinese student’s Facebook page to “go home” and blamed Chinese nationals for the Covid-19 pandemic. Do students censor their professors when they criticize homework assignments? Again, FIRE seems to think so; it penalized the University of Pittsburgh because a student posted a critical video on TikTok.
The fact that reasonable people can disagree on these questions, and that those disagreements would lead to different speech rankings, reflects the fact that it is impossible to create a universal metric for a concept as malleable as “free speech.”
FIRE deserves some credit. It is remarkably transparent — without making its datasets publicly available, this audit would not have been possible. It also has a difficult job. Campus free speech is one of the most-polarizing issues of our time, which is why it is so important that FIRE not mislead readers about the facts.
That importance is clear in the case of Joshua T. Katz, a former professor at Princeton University. In its dataset, FIRE writes that “Katz was terminated after he criticized an open letter signed by Princeton faculty requesting that Princeton adopt numerous antiracist policies on campus.” This clearly implies Katz was fired for his speech. Here’s what actually happened:
In 2018, Katz went on leave after an investigation found he had a sexual relationship with a student in the mid-2000s, violating university policy. Later — in 2020 — Katz wrote an opinion essay criticizing the aforementioned open letter. In it, he also accused a student group of being a “terrorist organization.” His writing gained significant controversy, but Princeton did not punish or investigate him for his speech. Indeed, in July 2020, Katz wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal titled “I Survived Cancellation at Princeton.” In it, he wrote, “free speech and robust debate have prevailed at Princeton.”
But then, in 2021, a student newspaper published an article about Katz’s sexual misconduct. The university soon opened a second investigation. They discovered that Katz had previously lied to investigators and had pressured former students not to cooperate with the initial investigation. The university terminated him shortly thereafter.
Katz and his defenders (his most notable being his wife, whom he met during her freshman year as her professor) claim he was fired for his controversial speech. That claim is dubious. He was fired two years after making the controversial comments in question. Lying to impede a sexual-misconduct investigation is an egregious offense. And yet, FIRE decried Princeton’s actions as a “sham investigation” and compared the university to Stalin’s secret police — with what appears to be merely circumstantial evidence. (Katz is represented by Samantha Harris, a former FIRE lawyer. FIRE claims that their legal team determined that there was sufficient reason to believe that Katz’s relationship with the student was resurrected as a pretext to retaliate against him.)
As in many of the other cases, FIRE’s willingness to ring the alarm with minimal evidence is problematic. But it is especially odious here because of the implications for other professors facing similar allegations. FIRE is effectively endorsing professors who silence their critics and victims, and penalizing colleges that hold those professors accountable. That is the opposite of free speech.
