America’s universities have forgotten what education is for. And they are increasingly willing to treat the God-given right of free speech as something administrators may grant or withdraw.
American higher education received its annual free-speech report card this week. The good news is that the patient has a pulse. The bad news is that we have apparently lowered our expectations to the point where this counts as good news.
Maybe students are beginning to rediscover something their institutions forgot: Hearing an argument does not constitute an injury.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression released its 2027 College Free Speech Rankings, based on the experiences of nearly 63,000 students at 261 American colleges and universities. The average university continues to perform badly at one of the activities universities were ostensibly invented to encourage: thinking out loud.
This is an unusual institutional achievement. A hospital that made patients afraid to discuss their symptoms would attract attention. A law school where students feared making arguments would be considered defective. But a university where students learn to keep controversial thoughts to themselves can still issue press releases celebrating its commitment to dialogue.
It is all the art of illusion. Universities tell the public, “We are inclusive,” while students know they may have to self-censor or risk angering professors who control their grades.
I know something about this from the inside. I have taught at Arizona State University for more than two decades. Our motto is “inclusive excellence.” Yet I run a Substack where I document how ASU professors stifle free speech and push DEI and LGBTQ ideology onto their students.
ASU is slipping in the FIRE rankings. This year it ranks 29th out of 261 schools, down from 23rd last year. Its numerical score increased from about 70 to 72, but its grade remains a C-.
Apparently, even grade inflation has limits.
A C- is awful, and ASU administrators should make correcting course a top priority. Instead, they host events like “Queer Animacies.”
The more interesting numbers are buried beneath the overall ranking.
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FIRE reports that ASU remains in the bottom 50 nationally for “openness,” its measure of whether students believe they can discuss controversial subjects freely. Even more striking, ASU’s ranking for “administrative support” fell 107 places in a single year.
Think about that combination. Students attend a university to learn how to think, yet many perceive controversial subjects as effectively off-limits, while their confidence that administrators will defend free speech has substantially deteriorated.
This points to a deeper problem than free speech.
We have forgotten what a university is for.
Socrates did not walk around Athens distributing approved answers. He asked questions. Irritating questions, as the Athenians eventually discovered.
He questioned politicians, poets, and craftsmen who believed themselves wise and discovered that possessing expertise in one subject has a curious tendency to persuade people that they possess expertise in everything.
Twenty-five centuries later, we have perfected the type.
The university is supposed to cultivate intellectual maturity by forcing students to distinguish what they know from what they merely assume. That requires disagreement. It requires professors willing to have their own beliefs questioned. And it requires students who can make an argument without first consulting the ideological weather report.
When I was recently interviewed by KJZZ in Phoenix about my Arizona Supreme Court case, leftists — including ASU professors — took to the Facebook comments to dish out personal attacks because I dared to question the university’s DEI curriculum. My case concerns a training program I argue violated Arizona law; ASU has disputed my claims, and the Arizona Supreme Court is now being asked to decide whether I may proceed with the suit.
Such professors teach students the one skill required for university success: identifying the professor’s approved conclusion.
This is not education. Not even close. It’s training students to lie for approval and to accept censorship.
The problem becomes particularly obvious when universities congratulate themselves on “critical thinking.”
Critical thinking is one of those phrases that appears in university mission statements with approximately the frequency of “excellence,” “inclusion,” and “innovation.” Everyone favors it because nobody bothers to define it.
But critical thinking cannot mean criticizing only the ideas your professors have already designated as problematic.
If students are encouraged to “interrogate” Christianity but not transgender ideology, colonialism but not Marxism, capitalism but not DEI, they have not been taught critical thinking.
They have been given a list of suspects.
Real critical thinking is considerably more dangerous because it applies the same standards to everyone.
Can you define your terms?
What is your evidence?
Does your conclusion follow from your premises?
Are your premises true?
What would prove you wrong?
Those questions are wonderfully indifferent to race, sex, political party, academic rank, ideology, or preferred pronouns.
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Logic has always suffered from an embarrassing lack of sensitivity.
This is why free speech is not merely one university value among many. It is inseparable from the purpose of the institution. And it is a God-given right, not a gift to be handed out and taken back by radical professors or university administrators.
A university exists because human beings are not born knowing the truth. We must learn.
Learning requires discovering that some things we believe are false. Discovering that requires allowing someone to tell us we are wrong.
Remove that possibility and the university ceases to be a university in anything but name.
There is at least one encouraging finding in the new national data. Student tolerance for shouting down speakers, blocking access to events, and using violence against speakers declined slightly from last year’s record highs. Maybe students are beginning to rediscover something their institutions forgot: Hearing an argument does not constitute an injury.
That’s progress.
But universities should not congratulate themselves because students have become slightly less enthusiastic about silencing one another. The standard is considerably higher.
The university should be the place in American life where the unpopular question is most welcome.
Where the student can challenge the professor.
Where the professor can challenge the administration.
Where Christians, atheists, conservatives, progressives, Marxists, and their increasingly rare opponents can all be asked the same unforgiving question: How do you know?
Until universities recover that purpose, Americans will need to be honest about their value.
And we will cultivate our God-given freedom to think elsewhere.
Arizona supreme court, Education, Free speech, Lgbtq ideology, First amendment, Fire, Asu, Dei, Christianity, Conservatives, Opinion & analysis
