This article is from a special report on the Athens Democracy Forum in association with The New York Times.
On college campuses all over the world, freedom of speech is facing increasing challenges. Students in Europe, Asia and the United States shout down speakers they do not agree with and force events to be canceled even before they happen. University administrators and faculty keep alternative viewpoints off the syllabus in an effort to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (D.E.I.).
Demonstrations against Israel, different political philosophies and speakers with unpopular viewpoints — right or left — have sometimes devolved into violence and building takeovers, like at the University of California, Berkeley, in February 2024, when a private event with an Israeli speaker was shut down after a group of about 200 pro-Palestinian protesters encircled the venue, shouting slogans, smashing windows and breaking into the building.
Such clashes have left universities scrambling to define the line between free speech and repression, and led governments to intercede. In Hungary, for example, Prime Minister Viktor Orban forced the relocation to Austria of Central European University, an institution founded in Hungary by the billionaire financier and liberal philanthropist George Soros. Mr. Orban also brought 11 other universities under the control of foundations led by his allies.
In India, supporters of the right-wing governing party have been appointed as administrators at Jawaharlal Nehru University, a liberal institution.
In the United States, President Donald J. Trump and his administration are citing campus clashes in a push to end university D.E.I. programs and root out what they view as widespread antisemitism. They have suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for university research, as punishment for what they view as “woke” views.
And in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has replaced board members and administrators at the University of Florida, the state’s most prestigious university, and overhauled governance and admissions at the public liberal arts school, New College, to counter what he has characterized as biased, leftist policies.
The standoff between governments and higher education is scheduled to be a key topic of discussion at the Athens Democracy Forum, an annual gathering of policymakers and business leaders, academics and activists held in Greece in association with The New York Times.
Conference panelists will be discussing the cases of Hungary and India, as well as other places where governments and universities have clashed over free speech.
The question is, what should a democracy do to stop its campuses from turning into political battlefields?
Many academics and free-speech campaigners said the problem — as well as the solution — was within higher education itself.
“Universities are ideologically monochrome, and they’re averse to viewpoint diversity,” said Thomas Gift, an American associate professor of political science at University College London, who teaches a course at Harvard University every summer.
Gift said the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion are favored by many, including himself, but the way in which D.E.I. programs operate in U.S. universities is “conducive to all types of diversity besides viewpoint.”
“Republican voices, conservative voices, even moderate voices have been either silenced, or individuals have felt the need to self-censor,” he said, noting that it was often easier for professors not to talk about politically charged issues than to risk being reported by a student to the administration.
“Reform does need to happen,” he said.
Critics noted that universities have been inconsistent in their defense of freedom of expression.
Greg Lukianoff, a lawyer, author and activist who heads FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — said he has spent his 24-year career “sounding the alarm for free speech issues coming from higher education,” and found it extremely hard to “get people to take this seriously.”
Pointing to recent events, he said 2023 and 2024 were the two worst years for shout-downs on campus — meaning “not someone heckling a speaker,” but “students making it impossible for a speech to go on.”
Other recent cases highlighted on his organization’s website include: demands by a university student for “The Great Gatsby” to be accompanied by a trigger warning (because of its suicide and domestic violence content); a student being prevented from distributing copies of the U.S. Constitution on Constitution Day; and the disinviting by universities of commencement speakers such as the former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the then-International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde.
Faculty members at top U.S. universities do not deny that their institutions are ripe for reform. Some are even campaigning for it.
Hélène Landemore, a French-born Yale professor of political science who will be a speaker at the Athens Democracy Forum, cited a “total lack of transparency and, in my view, accountability” within the Yale administration — “a corporate style of governance that prioritizes branding, risk management, donor relations and all of these things over academic freedom.”
She commended D.E.I. programs for broadening the curriculum, admitting that she previously had “only dead white men on the syllabus,” and subsequently incorporated works by the sociologist W.E.B. DuBois, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and women authors.
Yet D.E.I. has also led university administrations to intervene in faculty decision-making and recruitment, slowing processes down and introducing bias, she said. As a result, faculty and students are being “squeezed from both sides,” she added. “We’re vilified by the Trump administration as radical and woke, but internally, we’re being micromanaged and, frankly, silenced by administrative political correctness.”
Admittedly, the second Trump administration is giving rise to a whole new set of free-speech cases on campus.
Last summer, a senior lecturer teaching “Literature for Children” at Texas A&M University was explaining the differences between gender identity and gender expression when a student spoke out in protest while filming herself.
“I’m not entirely sure this is legal,” she said, “because, according to our president, there’s only two genders.” Besides, it went against her religious beliefs and those of others, so she would not participate in the course.
The video was posted on social media and spotted by Republican politicians, including the governor of Texas, who accused the university of “blatantly indoctrinating students in gender ideology” and demanded action. Since then, the lecturer and two administrators, as well as the president of Texas A&M, have all left.
The University of Pennsylvania has been in the eye of the storm since well before Trump’s election. Its president, Elizabeth Magill, resigned in December 2023 after being questioned in a tense congressional hearing about campus antisemitism (along with Harvard President Claudine Gay and M.I.T. President Sally Kornbluth).
In a video interview, Magill — who is a professor of law at the Penn Carey Law School, and will also be speaking at the Athens Democracy Forum — said the Trump administration had “created what are, at least in my lifetime, unprecedented challenges for the higher education sector,” and added that some of the challenges could prove irreversible — especially the changes to the way federal grants work.
She said decades-long research programs were being shut down at universities across the country, including at departments conducting vital research into fields such as childhood cancer research and studies on the brains of early-onset Alzheimer’s patients.
All in all, said Lukianoff of FIRE, the United States is “in a free speech crisis at the moment, and I don’t think this is going to lift anytime soon.”
“A lot of protections that we put in place, both in First Amendment law but also in free-speech norms in the United States, have been thrown out the window,” he said.
The only solution, he noted, was to defend freedom of expression properly.
Why? “Because it works really well,” he said. “If you can’t talk about your problems, they get worse. You have backlashes, you have eruptions. Rather than using free speech as an alternative to violence, you often get violence.”
Gift, the University College London associate professor, suggested setting up dedicated centers for free speech and open debate on university campuses (such as the Hoover Institution at Stanford University) to give voice to underrepresented or conservative perspectives.
He also recommended that universities teach a first-year course on “disagreeing well,” so that all freshman students could learn to respect opposing views. Gift and a colleague are teaching one such course in London this semester.
The website description of “Disagreeing Well” starts with a quote from the mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi (“Honest disagreement is often a sign of progress”), and notes that “at its worst, disagreement can provoke war, misery and suffering.” But at its best, it notes, it can enable “world-shifting innovations and peace through the vetting of truth and great ideas.”
“We’re in a storm right now,” said Lukianoff. “But I hope to be able to help get the country back in favor of free speech, for even the opinion that they hate.”
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