A few weeks ago, I welcomed Princeton’s newly arrived undergraduates to campus with what has become an annual tradition: a presidential lecture on the importance of free speech and civil discussion. This semester, I will host small seminars with first-year and transfer students to impress upon them my view that free speech is essential to the research and teaching mission of American universities.
Some people might expect my advocacy for robust debate to get a hostile reception. Cultural critics of a certain age love to describe the current generation of college students as fragile, steeped in “cancel culture,” and reluctant to confront opposing ideas. My own experience, however, is largely the opposite. As I observe in my new book, Terms of Respect, most of the students with whom I talk are committed to constructive discussion and eager to encounter views different from their own. Even the horrific events in Utah earlier this month illustrate the point. Thousands of students at Utah Valley University had gathered to hear Charlie Kirk speak and debate audience members before he was killed by an assassin with no apparent connection to the school.
What accounts for the gap between public perception and on-campus reality? Part of the answer is that several cases of genuinely closed-minded student behavior have attracted disproportionate and long-running attention. These include the attack on the political scientists Charles Murray and Allison Stanger at Middlebury College, in 2017, and the heckling of Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford Law School, in 2023. Such incidents are inexcusable. Colleges must discipline the students responsible when such episodes occur. But there are millions of lectures, classes, art exhibitions, and other events on American-college campuses every year. Disruptions are rare—which is why a few outrageous events get regurgitated so often in stories about the allegedly censorious climate on campus.
A related problem is that lists and databases of student misbehavior lump genuine disruptions together with other kinds of oppositional activity, such as protests and requests that the university denounce an offensive speaker. Protesting a speaker or criticizing an invitation is, however, itself an exercise of free speech, not an infringement upon it. A campus with a lot of protest may have an excellent free-speech climate.
Confusion about this point infects the free-speech rankings that the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression publishes periodically. In 2023, FIRE ranked Michigan Technological University as the best school in the country for free speech. FIRE’s director of polling and analytics, Sean Stevens, told the New York Post that it made sense that “a technological school has a better speech climate, primarily for the reason that they don’t really talk as much about controversial topics.” In fact, the failure to talk about controversial topics is not a free-speech success story. It is a free-speech disaster. Stevens’s mistake is telling: Free-speech rankings too often code controversy as censorship and silence as freedom.
When disruptions do occur, students and colleges sometimes get tarred by the behavior of outsiders. At Princeton, we experienced a series of disruptions to speeches last spring; the worst of them occurred when somebody pulled a fire alarm to cut short an event featuring former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. We did not catch the person who triggered the alarm, but we did identify several people who violated university rules at the Bennett event or at earlier ones. None of those people were members of the Princeton community. The university responded by increasing security levels at high-profile events and requiring that attendees preregister and have university ID cards. That policy has its own free-speech costs—ideally, universities should be open to neighbors and visitors—but it stopped the interruptions. The challenge of providing appropriate security at college events will undoubtedly increase after the murder of Kirk.
Critics of universities might counter that, even if true episodes of campus censorship are rare, what matters is that students are afraid to express themselves. In making that claim, however, they rely on poorly constructed polls, typically produced by advocacy groups, that paint a misleadingly dismal picture of student attitudes toward free speech. For example, a common question asks students whether they feel comfortable expressing their opinion about controversial topics. “Comfort,” however, is the wrong metric for judging a free-speech climate. Speaking up is often hard, especially in a setting where professors and peers may challenge your viewpoint. Justice Louis Brandeis, one of the great figures in the history of American free speech, wrote in Whitney v. California that the Constitution’s First Amendment presupposes a “courageous, self-reliant” people. The point of college should be to build that courage, and to teach the skills that enable people to listen to and learn from one another. That should feel uncomfortable.
Media-industry incentives also inflate the public’s perception of campus censoriousness. Websites including Campus Reform and The College Fix peddle a steady stream of anecdotes that feed the fury of an audience already disposed to be angry with left-wing professors and students. Some of those articles work their way up the food chain to mainstream-media outlets. Stories about intolerant students get clicks and eyeballs. They are catnip for older readers (or editors) prone to tut-tutting about the younger generation. Likewise, ambitious college students seeking to publish op-eds in national venues will have better odds if they submit titillating stories about cancel culture than if they offer columns about civil and respectful discussion.
I do not mean to suggest that today’s campus culture always creates a free-speech nirvana. Students and faculty can sometimes be intolerant. Then again, so can most American adults. When controversial speakers appear on the Princeton campus, I almost always get more complaints and disinvitation demands from outsiders than I do from Princeton students.
Students have told me that the biggest free-speech problem on campus today is self-censorship in deference to peer pressure. Their assessment coincides with the conclusions of some of the best social-science work on the topic, such as the excellent study of University of North Carolina–system campuses by the political scientist Timothy Ryan and his colleagues. Self-censorship is a problem on campuses not because of some problem special to young people or colleges but because self-censorship is a problem in America. Public-opinion data consistently show that Americans in general are losing the ability and the desire to speak constructively to those with whom they disagree—a problem all too evident in the nation’s polarized politics and caustic public discourse.
Many of the students with whom I speak see that problem and want to be part of the solution. That will not be easy. The divisions in American society run deep. I find reason for optimism, however, in the talent and aspirations of the young people on my campus. They genuinely care about free speech and constructive discussion. They also care about ensuring that people from all backgrounds can participate fully in those conversations. That combination is all too rare in our society today.
I write this knowing that a small group of students could behave intolerantly tomorrow or on any other day. They might embarrass me and my university. Protesters can say outrageous things, including about me. Yet I also know that students today—like their predecessors—can, and often do, inspire me with their efforts to hold our country to its highest ideals. We should recognize and respect their commitment to our constitutional values and welcome their voices to the conversation. They are needed.
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