Here’s How College Presidents Can Avoid Congress This Year

But college presidents make their jobs harder when they fail to define and educate their schools’ core missions. students on their freedom of speech and the rights of academic freedom.

My organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, recently… interviewed approximately 59,000 college students and found that 69% said it was somewhat acceptable to shout down a speaker on campus, up from 63% a year earlier. A shocking 32% said the same about using violence to stop a speech on campus, up from 27%.

These dismal statistics are a sign of the failure of higher education leadership. Yelling at speakers or using violence to stop them is not an exercise of free speech, but censorship of a crowd.

Today’s college students cannot become tomorrow’s leaders if they resort to illiberal tactics to suppress speech with which they disagree. They also fail to advance the mission of higher education that the University of Chicago properly fulfills. defines as “the discovery, improvement and dissemination of knowledge.”

Administrators too often fail to explain to students that free speech and academic freedom are central when they come to campus, or provide confusing instructions that either paralyze free speech or provoke anarchy.

About a quarter of students say it is “not at all” or “not very” clear that their administration protects free speech on campus, while 42% say it is only “somewhat” clear. Former presidents of Harvard University, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania fell victim to this ambiguity and are now out of work.

That’s why colleges should inform students about free speech and academic freedom rights, including their limitations, as early as orientation week. Some colleges, such as the University of North Carolina at Asheville, have already begun doing this.

It is also critical that the principles of free speech are consistently upheld. No hypocrisy. No double standards.

Students who move from speech to violence or use violence to suppress speech should be punished. The same goes for students who yell at speakers or significantly disrupt class. Behavior that is rewarded is repeated. Colleges should have the utmost tolerance for speech and zero tolerance for crowd censorship.

And then there’s politics: 85% of colleges support speech codes which clearly and significantly restrict freedom of speech or are so vague that they entail administrative abuse. They need to be eliminated, including the so-called “Bias Response Hotlines”, which encourages students to anonymously report speech they find offensive.

Presidents should then commit their institutions to protecting free speech and academic freedom, preferably in a written document that clearly sets out the policy.

The gold standard for such a policy is Chicago Statementintroduced in 2015 and since then accepted by 110 institutions or faculties. It states, in part, that “the university should not attempt to shield people from ideas and opinions that they find objectionable, distasteful or even deeply offensive.” This policy must be communicated widely and frequently to the campus community. After all, a policy that no one knows about is ripe for selective use.

The final way presidents can set the right tone is by adopting policies institutional neutrality on social and political issues beyond the core mission of the college. This removes the expectation that the institution will have to weigh in every time a political quagmire arises and allows the student body to debate without administrators putting their thumb on the scale.

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Refusing to take an official position also makes a college president’s job easier—it protects his institution from the charges of hypocrisy that are inevitably made whenever administrators speak out on some issues but not others. Johns Hopkins University, Emerson College and the University of Alabama all recently accepted a policy of institutional neutrality, eliminating the need to write win-win statements on controversial current events. Harvard, on the other hand, has written seven applications since October 7, 2023, failing miserably each time. She learned her lesson and accepted institutional neutrality in May.

As we’ve learned from the fates of Ivy League presidents over the past year, ambiguity in matters of free speech will eventually catch up with you. That’s why college presidents should commit to teaching and protecting free speech and institutional neutrality—three simple paths to quieter campuses in 2024 and beyond.

Nico Perrineau – executive vice president Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He is also the presenter So to speak: “Freedom of Speech” podcast and co-director and senior producer of a documentary on free speech. Mighty Ira.