I’ve noticed that people tend to only hear about campus free speech cases which fit their particular narrative (either of conservatives censoring liberals or of liberals censoring conservatives). Apolitical cases (for instance, Valencia College’s censorship of students who protested forced transvaginal ultrasounds) tend to become less widely known, as do cases of liberal censorship among conservatives and conservative censorship among liberals. In addition, people hear more about cases of censorship at famous colleges (such as Harvard or Yale) than they do about the less famous colleges that most people actually go to.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is a well-respected organization which specializes in campus free speech and other civil liberties. My sample was the list FIRE maintains on its website of cases it has worked on in the past (for instance, by sending the college a letter or engaging in litigation). I took every fifth case and coded it as censorship of conservative, censorship of liberal, or apolitical censorship. There were 88 cases in my sample. I dropped five for being FIRE suing about bad policies with no clear indication of whom they would be used against, four for being sexual misconduct policies (which are not instances of censorship), and two for being miscellaneous instances of inadequate college due process (which, again, are not censorship). This left me with 77 cases.
Of the 77 cases, I coded 20 (26%) as censorship of liberals, 40 (52%) as censorship of conservatives, and 17 (22%) as apolitical censorship. An example of censorship of conservatives is refusing to allow Christians to organize a student group; an example of censorship of liberals is not allowing PETA supporters to hand out flyers; an example of apolitical censorship is suspending a professor for saying, during a review session for a test, that the questions he was asking were so difficult he was on a killing spree.
I made a few judgment calls which I want to discuss. One instance of a hate speech code was coded as “censorship of liberals” because surrounding discussion suggested it was intended to censor pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests. While some people would consider sexual harassment law to be inherently liberal, I classified (for instance) the censorship of a crew team’s shirts saying “check out our cox” as apolitical censorship, since lewd puns are not a political sentiment. (Of course, if sexual harassment law was used to censor a political statement, I classified it as “liberal” or “conservative.”) I classified socialists as liberal and libertarians as conservative, in spite of both groups’ probable objection to such a classification. “Nationwide disinvitation of speakers,” a single FIRE case, was classified as conservative because 9/10 of the most disinvited speakers are conservative, but note that Bill Ayers is also on the list. (It is also a judgment call that I (a) didn’t treat each disinvitation as a separate case and (b) included “nationwide disinvitations” at all.)
ETA: I’d also like to note that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is not a random sample of college censorship cases. Presumably they do not pursue every case brought to their attention, and there may be systematic biases in which students contact FIRE. For example, conservative students may trust FIRE more and be more likely to call them when campus censorship occurs, or conversely FIRE may pursue more cases of liberal censorship to combat its image as a defender of the right wing. These results should be taken with a grain of salt.
In conclusion: there is a definite tendency for censorship on college campuses to be censorship of conservative viewpoints, perhaps because conservative viewpoints tend to be underrepresented in academia. However, about a quarter of college censorship in this sample is of liberal viewpoints and a quarter is of apolitical viewpoints; this suggests it is a mistake to assume that censorship on college campuses is solely of conservative viewpoints. However, given the limitations of my data, I’d strongly advise against drawing any conclusion from it firmer than “censorship of both liberals and conservatives occurs on college campuses, and conservatives probably face more.”
Thing of Things 
That’s interesting, and a nice bit of data to have. Thank you!
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What do you think of the hypothesis that the transvaginal ultrasound thing didn’t make the news, not because it was apolitical, but because it was at a random community college instead of at Harvard?
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It seems like relatively apolitical censorship at Harvard also deson’t get reported much (e.g. this, this). But I expect both the college’s obscurity and the apolitical nature of the issue are involved.
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This is interesting, but I wonder if their list is current enough. Haidt has suggested that we are seeing a shift this year to more pressure on free speech from the right. I didn’t check their database for all the recent cases, but the ones I did search for weren’t there yet, and one of them didn’t show up in a general search of their website.
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Also, FIRE’s list is only a list of cases they’ve worked on– if a college is behaving unconscionably but legally, or FIRE isn’t working on it for whatever reason, then it’s not going to show up.
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I think of FIRE as a relatively conservative organization, so I’m not sure how much to trust the conservative: liberal ratio you see in their data. Like, FIRE may be paying more attention to censorship of conservatives.
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Yeah. That said, in my reading of their cases, they did defend some liberals who seemed frankly outrageous to me (here’s an example), which seems like an odd thing to do if they’re trying to, for instance, only defend the most defensible liberals. Of course, they might have some other procedure for selecting which liberals to defend. I suspect they are biased but I’m unsure which way the bias goes: they might be trying to combat their reputation as a conservative organization by defending more liberal/apolitical cases, for example.
It’s unclear to me which way the causation goes on FIRE having a reputation as conservative– like, if twice as many conservatives are censored as liberals, they might get a reputation as a conservative organization even if they are consistently defending free speech on both sides.
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It’s also the case that censorship is distinct from cases of censorship.
Suppose there are two universities: a small liberal arts college and a small bible college. The liberal arts college has a mealy-mouthed “statement of principles” condemning hate speech; the bible college has a twenty point statement of doctrine that all students must sign in order to attend.
When conservative students invite So-and-So to the liberal arts college, there are protests, counter-protests, administrative actions, etc. etc.
When liberal students think to invite So-and-So to the bible college, they either 1) know it would never be accepted so don’t try in the first place 2) run into a total denial of this opportunity, of the sort that doesn’t register as a controversy (“we floated it in a meeting but the faculty advisor said No so we didn’t bother to try”) or 3) are successful, and the other bible college policies (e.g., a strict prohibition on protest) prevent the issue from rising to a clash.
It seems to me that institution 1 would end up in the FIRE database and not institution 2, even though institution 2 is definitely more censorious, and even though in most cases institution 2 is censoring liberals, not conservatives.
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SLAC tend to attract a wider ideological range in students than bible colleges. A conservative or conservative leaning student might choose to attend a SLAC because they aren’t that religious and the SLAC is still a better choice than the Bible college for that reason. I’m struggling why anybody remotely liberal leaning might attend a Bible college and the only thing coming to my head is parental pressure. This makes speech controversies more probable at SLAC than Bible colleges and more likely to get in the news. Bible colleges are pretty explicit about who they are and nobody is surprised when an LGBT rights activist is denied a platform at them.
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I went to an extremely conservative religious college. I didn’t agree with everything taught at the school, but it never would have *occurred* to me to protest. Even writing an article in the school paper got you all the backlash you could possibly want, if you would want it on a campus of 400 people who might ALL be angry at you. And posting flyers was banned altogether.
Now this college suffered from both conservative and liberal censorship, in a way, because the admin was equally unwilling to hear the “liberal” viewpoint that perhaps the Enlightenment wasn’t as bad as all that, or to hear the “conservative” viewpoint that we should go back to burning heretics.
Since I graduated they’ve been better at actually allowing discussion. Unfortunately 95% of the stuff that has come out of it has been ideas that are too *conservative* for the admin. Kind of the “fifty Stalins” phenomenon.
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The forced transvaginal ultrasounds case doesn’t seem to involve any censorship at all, if the CNN article is to be believed. The issue was that the students were forced to ‘volunteer’ and that the procedure was done in unpleasant ways; not that they were disallowed to talk about it. Classifying this as a free speech case reduces my confidence that the classification of FIRE cases was done correctly.
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Liberalism (and conservatism) are not a monolith, so you’d expect people who favor censoring the other tribe to also be willing to censor those they strongly disagree with in their own tribe (like Germaine Greer).
It’s perfectly possible for the climate to be far more hostile to the average conservative and yet for the number of free speech cases not to reflect this (accurately). For example, let’s do a thought experiment where:
– 9/10 people on campus are liberal and 1/10 is conservative
– every person whose free speech is stifled is registered by FIRE
– 1 in 9 liberals and every conservative experiences censorship
Then FIRE would register equal numbers of liberal and conservative censorship cases, even though conservatives would actually be censored 9 times as often. Basically, you cannot derive a conclusion about what percentage of each group experience something, by just looking at the absolute numbers. You need to factor in the size of the groups. For example, you also can’t conclude that white people are more likely to be poor than black people based on the fact that there are more poor white people. You need to factor in that there are fewer black people.
According to WaPo, the ratio of liberal to conservative professors in college is about 5 to 1 and the ratio of liberal to conservative students is about 2 to 1. So the ratio of 2 to 1 that Ozy found in absolute numbers would need to be multiplied by these numbers to get 10 to 1 and 4 to 1. So if we assume the unlikely, that there are no flaws in any of these numbers, then conservatives have a 4-10 times higher chance to be censored.
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Oops, I misread the graph with the ratio of liberal to conservative students. It’s 1.5 to 1, not 2 to 1. So that would make it a 3-10 times higher chance to be censored.
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The article might not have made it clear (shame on me for not just linking for the FIRE case) but they were silenced for complaining about the forced transvaginal ultrasounds, which is a free speech issue.
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OK, fair enough.
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I believe FIRE has a policy of not acting if the institution:
1. Is private, and
2. Does not claim to uphold free speech principles, or explicitly subordinates those principles to a “greater” agenda.
So Oral Roberts University banning a Pride parade would not be dealt with by FIRE, but Evergreen shutting down YAF would.
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While I think free speech and academic freedom at Oral Roberts is also an issue, I think it’s a different enough issue from (say) censorship at UC Berkeley– a supposedly secular and nonpartisan organization– that it’s worth handling separately.
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One of the claims I see frequently from the left in the campus censorship debate is that censorship from the right often comes not from the students but from the statehouse (e.g. denying funds to schools that offer diversity studies programs). If this is so, would your methodology detect these?
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Thanks for the data analysis! Though this data might be much harder to obtain, I would also be interested in seeing some sort of control to see how many events on campus are liberal vs. conservative (I would expect that most events are liberal by your definition, so any given “conservative” event is an order of magnitude or two more likely to face censorship).
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FIRE shouldn’t be treated as a nonpartisan source here. They’re funded by a bunch of major right-wing donors — not only the Koch brothers, but the Adolph Coors foundation and the Scaife family. So it’s no surprise that they’d mostly operate on behalf of right-wing voices.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Individual_Rights_in_Education
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@Neiladri
Your use of SourceWatch to claim that FIRE is biased because of their funding is rather ironic since SourceWatch itself is funded by progressives. So if you distrust the claims that FIRE makes due to their funding, then you definitely should distrust the claims that SourceWatch makes about FIRE. Intellectual consistency requires this, IMHO.
The president of FIRE is Greg Lukianoff, who self-describes as a pro-choice liberal. He has written this article with Jonathan Haidt. Based on what I’ve seen, I suspect he is a classic liberal or libertarian. What would be called ‘grey tribe’ by many rationalists. His association with Haidt speaks greatly in his favor, in my view, as Haidt seems to be trying very hard to reject partisanship, seeking a situation of peaceful coexistence and cooperation, rather than ‘culture war.’
I disagree with the automatic assumption that people must be biased in who they advocate for based on their politics, rather than that people can have principles that they are willing to defend for all, even those they dislike for their beliefs. Even Milo Whateveropoulis spoke out in defense of Bahar Mustafa when she was charged with hate speech for example, even though their beliefs can’t be further apart.
Your assumption that FIRE can’t operate fairly for left-wingers ultimately is an assumption of bad faith that destroys any ability for people with different high-level ideals to work together when they do agree on certain principles. IMO this increasing tendency to require complete agreement before willing to work with people is destroying non-partisan institutions, which is extremely destructive, both as these institutions form important checks and balances for a democracy, but also because they are the connecting tissue which keeps society together.
Anyway, we have seen that FIRE spoke out for Bret Weinstein, who is definitely a very left-wing person (he is just not pro-race segregation). So in high profile cases, they are certainly willing to speak out for those on the left.
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