Opinion - Free speech is in trouble: Higher education needs higher standards

This op-ed is part of The Hill’s “How to Fix America” series exploring solutions to some of the country’s most pressing problems.

This year, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) celebrates its 25th anniversary. I have been with FIRE for 23 of those years, and while we have since expanded our mission beyond defending free speech in higher education, it is still central to what we do. The state of free speech and academic freedom was worse than I expected when I started back in 2001. And yet it has gotten worse to a degree that would have been unimaginable over the last 10 years — particularly in the last five.

We’ve witnessed an unprecedented number of professors targeted for firing, and one in six professors say that they have been punished or threatened with punishment for speech, research or in-class instruction. And according to data from a survey of student experiences that FIRE conducted last summer, one in 10 students said that they had been punished or threatened with punishment for their expression.

This summer, FIRE conducted a survey in response to student protest encampments (the results of which will be released next week), which showed that number is closer to one in three. 2023 was the worst year in history for shout-downs of campus speakers and other forms of de-platforming. Unfortunately, due in large part to pro-Palestinian protestors, who have been responsible for every campus shout-down FIRE has recorded since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack in southern Israel, this year is already the second-worst year, and well on pace to shatter last year’s record.

At the same time, the cost of a college degree has steadily increased, overwhelmingly to pay for administrators, whose ranks have grown prodigiously over the last several decades even as the number of full-time professors has remained comparatively flat or declined.

If the only problem with higher education today were that it is too expensive and too bureaucratized, that would surely be enough to prompt calls for major reform. But given the chilly atmosphere for freedom of speech, the lack of viewpoint diversity among professors, and the omnipresent incentives — both formal and informal — encouraging professors toward academic conclusions that are popular among the activist class in higher education, the fundamental function of the academy as a reliable producer of useful knowledge is in jeopardy.

Higher education badly needs change, but what should those changes look like? Here are 10 common-sense reforms that every school in the country should consider:

• Stay true to the ultimate purpose of higher education: the search for and production of knowledge.

• Recommit to the protection of academic freedom with policies and practices that allow professors and students to challenge sacred cows.

• Never cave to outrage mobs. Use their cancelation attempts as opportunities to remind the community that free speech is indispensable to your school’s mission.

• Adopt institutional neutrality as outlined in the University of Chicago’s “Kalven Report” to ensure that the university remains the “home and sponsor of critics…not itself the critic.”

• Prioritize the virtues of curiosity, dissent, devil’s advocacy, thought experimentation and talking across lines of difference in hiring, admissions, orientations and programming.

• Teach and promote a scholarly mindset and epistemic humility in orientations and programming throughout the year.

• Prohibit disruptive conduct and expel students who engage in violence in response to speech.

• Eliminate political litmus tests such as diversity statements in hiring and admissions.

• Collect data on the campus climate to ensure all within the community feel free to inquire, speak and learn.

• Cut administrative bloat. Regulation should be streamlined so there is no need for the massive ranks of Title IX officers who often target professorial speech. Anonymous “bias-related incident” hotlines should be eliminated.

But schools must go even further. They should consider following in the footsteps of Dartmouth and offer as many classes as possible that are co-taught by professors who actually disagree with one another.

At Princeton, conservative professor Robby George and frequent Green Party candidate Cornel West have done this for years. This can help students understand that there is always more than one way to look at any particular issue. We need to encourage adversarial collaboration among scholars who disagree on various research topics, as suggested in a recent paper by Stephen Ceci, Cory Clark, Lee Jussim and Wendy Williams.

We need to retrain the entire administrative apparatus on campus to see their jobs not as policing what students say but as encouraging debate and discussion and defending academic freedom and freedom of speech. Administrators who cannot or will not be retrained in that direction should be let go.

And for every time there is a shout-down, de-platforming or cancelation attempt against a professor or student, each school should have an independent process in place to assess whether or not administrators did anything to try to mitigate the chilling of speech. If not, they should be disciplined.

Or, as is more often the case, if administrators are found to have actually encouraged or contributed to the chilling of speech, they should be let go.

In terms of what can be done from outside the academy, possibly nothing could help reform higher education more than making fewer jobs require a bachelor’s or college degree in the first place. There should be other, highly rigorous ways for young people to show their competence and intelligence without having to go deeply into debt.

Congress should also look into ways to prevent federal financial aid from leading to a constant increase in cost and bureaucratization, perhaps by establishing an ideal ratio of full-time professors to non-teaching staff. When calculating this, they should consider how much schools claim it costs to educate a single student, not necessarily how much a single student ends up paying in tuition.

Something else that might help with both the atmosphere for independent thought and the spreading mental health crisis among young people is to encourage students to take a gap year or two before starting college, and to require state colleges to allow students who do to put off their start date by at least a year without penalty.

We also need non-profits and counter institutions to seriously look into how much of the knowledge that higher education is producing is even reproducible. The results that have come in so far have been distressing; we need a more comprehensive understanding of this if we want higher education to be able to produce shared facts that a democratic society can rely on.

The problems in higher education today are big and multifaceted, so we have to think big when considering ways to save higher education.

Greg Lukianoff is president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and co-author of “The Coddling of the American Mind” and “The Canceling of the American Mind.”

Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.