Free Speech on Campus: What Each Side Is Protecting

Jasmine is a junior at a large state university. Last fall, the biology department invited a researcher known for arguing that heritable cognitive differences between racial groups explain persistent economic gaps. Jasmine had read the papers; she found the methodology contested and the historical analogues troubling. But that wasn't her main concern. Her concern was what the invitation itself communicated: that the university was lending its stage and its authority to a framing her professors in the same building had spent careers critiquing — alone, without counterpart, in a public lecture. She helped organize the campaign to have the event canceled. She did not feel she was suppressing inquiry. She felt she was asking her institution to be honest about what endorsement looks like.

Professor David Levi teaches constitutional law at the same university. He signed the faculty letter defending the biology department's decision to invite the speaker. He did not find the researcher's conclusions persuasive. He signed because of what happened the semester before: a colleague in the sociology department assigned a text that used a racial slur — in a course on the history of racial slurs in American law — and faced a weeks-long campaign, eventually unsuccessful, to have her dismissed. Levi had watched his colleague teach the same class for fifteen years without incident, and then watched the same assignment become the basis for a professional crisis. His question was not about the biology speaker. His question was about who gets to decide where context ends and harm begins — and what it means for the enterprise of knowledge production when that question is answered by whoever is most willing to organize a campaign.

Both Jasmine and Levi are protecting something real, and both have seen something real fail. This is not a debate between people who care about harm and people who don't. It is a debate about which harms are most serious, who bears them, and what institutions owe to each.

What classical liberals and free speech absolutists are protecting

The case for near-absolute expressive freedom on campus is old enough that it can be mistaken for mere tradition. It is not. It rests on arguments that have only become more urgent as knowledge-producing institutions have become more consequential.

They are protecting the epistemic argument for open inquiry. John Stuart Mill's argument in On Liberty (1859) is still the sharpest version: even false ideas deserve a hearing, because we cannot know in advance that they are false, because challenging wrong ideas strengthens our understanding of right ones, and because the process of suppression itself corrupts the suppressors. Mill's famous worry was that orthodoxy defended by authority becomes a dead dogma rather than a living truth — held without the intellectual friction that makes understanding genuine. Jonathan Rauch updates this argument in The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Brookings Institution Press, 2021), arguing that liberal science — the social practice of submitting claims to challenge, evidence, and refutation — is the most successful error-correction system humans have developed, and that protecting it requires protecting the speech of people whose ideas are wrong. The system works not because it prevents bad ideas from being expressed, but because it provides mechanisms for defeating them.

They are protecting academic freedom as a distinctive institutional commitment. Academic freedom is not simply free speech applied to universities. It is a specific doctrine, developed over a century of university practice, premised on the idea that knowledge production requires researchers to follow evidence wherever it leads — including into conclusions that are politically unpopular, institutionally inconvenient, or personally uncomfortable for those in authority. The American Association of University Professors' 1915 Declaration of Principles argued that universities must protect faculty from external pressures precisely because those pressures inevitably push toward comfortable conclusions. A university that fires researchers for their findings is not merely restricting speech; it is corrupting the function that makes it valuable. Jasmine's professor who was nearly dismissed for teaching about slurs was not collateral damage from a bad judgment call. From this view, she was the point.

They are protecting the historical record on who gets hurt by speech restrictions. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has documented decades of campus speech code cases, and the pattern is uncomfortable for anyone who supports restrictions as protective of marginalized groups: speech codes have been used against Black students protesting on campus, against LGBTQ organizations, against students discussing their immigration status, against faculty raising race-related topics in class. The history of speech restriction in the United States more broadly — the Espionage Act used against socialist anti-war activists, sedition laws used against labor organizers, obscenity codes used against birth control advocates — is a history of nominally neutral rules being applied to silence dissent. The argument is not that this is inevitable. It is that who controls the institution determines how its rules are applied, and that marginalized groups are rarely the ones in control.

They are protecting the principle of viewpoint neutrality. A rule that permits criticism of one political position but not another is not a speech rule; it is a political program. Nadine Strossen, former ACLU president, argues in Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press, 2018) that content-neutral rules — applying equally to all viewpoints — are the only ones that can be sustained without becoming tools of whoever currently holds power. The alternative, she contends, is not a campus where harmful speech is prevented. It is a campus where the definition of harmful speech tracks the ideology of campus administrators, who are not reliably more just than anyone else.

What campus speech restriction advocates are protecting

The case for institutional limits on campus speech is frequently mischaracterized as fragility — students who cannot handle challenge, faculty who want ideological comfort. At its most serious, it is nothing of the kind. It is an argument about who bears the costs of expressive freedom and whether those costs are distributed fairly.

They are protecting the capacity of targeted students to actually participate in the learning environment. The "more speech" remedy — respond to bad ideas with better ones — assumes rough equality in standing and resources. A lone student of color in a mostly white lecture hall, facing a visiting researcher who argues that her group's cognitive deficits explain her group's economic position, does not have access to an equivalent platform. She cannot invite a counter-speaker the following week. She cannot arrange a press campaign. The "marketplace of ideas" model, critics argue, abstracts away the material conditions under which speech actually circulates — and those conditions systematically advantage some speakers over others. Research on stereotype threat, documented extensively in Claude Steele's Whistling Vivaldi (Norton, 2010), shows that students who belong to groups whose intellectual ability is socially questioned perform worse when that question is made salient — even without anyone directly insulting them. A campus environment saturated with the premise that your group is cognitively inferior is not a neutral backdrop for learning.

They are protecting a substantive rather than merely formal account of free expression. Philosopher Jeremy Waldron's The Harm in Hate Speech (Harvard University Press, 2012) makes the sharpest version of this argument. Hate speech, Waldron contends, does not merely cause offense or temporary distress. It attacks the public standing of targeted groups — their recognition as full and equal members of the community who deserve to be taken seriously, whose claims matter, whose participation is legitimate. This is a dignitary harm, not a psychological one, and it is distinct from the hurt feelings that free speech advocates rightly refuse to count. Waldron's claim is that a campus (or society) where members of certain groups are routinely subjected to speech that denies their equal standing is not, in any meaningful sense, one that offers equal expressive opportunity to everyone. The formal liberty to speak is not the same as the substantive capacity to be heard.

They are protecting an honest account of how power shapes "neutrality." Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlè Crenshaw argued in Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (Westview Press, 1993) that hate speech is not merely an expression of opinion but a performance of social subordination — that slurs and dehumanizing rhetoric do not just describe a hierarchical social order but actively enact and reinforce it. The seemingly neutral rule "protect all viewpoints equally" operates differently for speech that asserts equality and speech that denies it, because the former challenges the status quo and the latter reinforces it. This is not a claim that offensiveness justifies restriction. It is a claim that calling a rule "neutral" does not make it neutral in its social effects — and that this distinction matters for institutions that exist to serve everyone who comes through their doors.

They are protecting the university's responsibility as an institution, not just a forum. When a university invites a speaker, it does not merely provide a room. It lends its name, its facilities, its implicit endorsement to whoever speaks under its banner. Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman, in Free Speech on Campus (Yale University Press, 2017) — a book written by two law professors who are themselves committed free speech advocates — acknowledge this distinction: a university's expressive choices about what it sponsors, promotes, and features are themselves a form of speech, and those choices communicate to students what kinds of people and ideas the institution considers worthy of its platform. This is not the same as whether a student organization can invite a speaker with student fees, which raises different questions. It is a claim about what institutional endorsement means.

What conservative critics of campus culture are protecting

The conservative critique of campus speech norms is not identical to the free speech absolutist argument, though it overlaps. At its best, it is a warning about a specific failure mode: ideological monoculture hardening into enforced orthodoxy.

They are protecting viewpoint diversity as an epistemic good. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, in The Coddling of the American Mind (Penguin Press, 2018), document the sharp leftward tilt of American university faculties and argue that the resulting monoculture produces two compounding problems: students never encounter serious versions of positions they disagree with (damaging their capacity for genuine intellectual engagement), and faculty members self-censor to avoid professional consequences for holding heterodox views (corrupting the research enterprise). Their argument is not that universities should be politically balanced in some proportional sense. It is that institutions whose function is to produce knowledge need internal critics, and that a culture where certain views trigger professional consequences rather than engagement has undermined its own core mission. The Heterodox Academy, which Haidt co-founded, catalogs examples of faculty research suppressed, distorted, or abandoned not because it was methodologically weak but because its conclusions were politically uncomfortable in a specific direction.

They are protecting the distinction between offense and genuine harm. A persistent criticism of campus speech restriction movements is that they have expanded the category of "harm" so broadly that it now includes intellectual challenge, uncomfortable data, and positions that most of the world — including most people historically disadvantaged by American institutions — hold as ordinary. Lukianoff and Haidt document what they call "safetyism": the well-intentioned but ultimately damaging tendency to treat students as fragile, to protect them from exposure to ideas that might disturb them, and to validate the claim that discomfort itself is a form of injury. Their concern is not that genuine harm should be ignored. It is that a generation trained to experience intellectual challenge as threat will be poorly equipped to function in a world full of both.

They are protecting the careers and reputations of people who made mistakes without malice. The reputational infrastructure of social media has changed the stakes of campus speech conflicts in ways that neither the classical liberal framework nor the harm prevention framework fully accounts for. A professor who missteps in a lecture, or a student who sends an ill-considered message, now faces not just institutional discipline but permanent, searchable documentation of the worst moment of their professional life. Conservative critics of campus culture are frequently pointing to cases where the punishment — job loss, public shaming, permanent career damage — is grossly disproportionate to any plausible account of the harm caused. Whether or not they are right in individual cases, the concern about proportionality is coherent and deserves engagement rather than dismissal.

They are protecting the credibility of universities as institutions of shared inquiry rather than political advocacy. When universities take official positions on contested political questions — when administrators issue statements endorsing specific political frameworks, when ideologically homogeneous faculty treat one side of a live debate as settled — they risk their own authority as arbiters of evidence-based knowledge. The conservative critique here is that a university that functions as a political actor cannot simultaneously function as a trusted epistemic institution, and that the conflation of the two does lasting damage to public trust in expertise generally. This is a real concern, distinct from partisan grievance, and it intersects with broader questions about institutional credibility in democratic societies.

Where the real disagreement lives

The free speech on campus debate is usually framed as a conflict between free expression and harm prevention. That framing is real but incomplete. The deeper fractures run along four lines that the free speech framing tends to obscure.

What is the university actually for? This is the question underneath most of the others. A university understood primarily as a truth-seeking institution — in the tradition of Wilhelm von Humboldt's original vision — puts maximum weight on open inquiry and faculty autonomy, treats student discomfort as a feature rather than a bug, and evaluates speech policies primarily by their effects on knowledge production. A university understood primarily as a learning community — responsible for the intellectual and human development of students who often arrive unprepared for the full weight of adult life — puts more weight on pedagogical environment, belonging, and the conditions under which learning actually happens. A university understood as preparation for democratic citizenship emphasizes exposure to a range of views. These are not identical institutions, and policies well-designed for one are often poorly designed for the others. Most actual universities are trying to be all three at once, which is part of why the conflicts are so intractable.

What counts as harm? Harm prevention advocates and free speech advocates often talk past each other because they are using different definitions of harm. Legal harm includes specific categories: true threats, targeted harassment, incitement to imminent violence, quid pro quo sexual coercion. These are suppressible under existing law without implicating academic freedom. Psychological harm — the distress caused by offensive content — is a real phenomenon but is treated by most courts as insufficient, on its own, to justify restriction. Waldron's dignity harm — the attack on one's public standing as an equal member of the community — sits between these: more serious than mere offense, but not currently a recognized legal category in American law. Much of the campus speech debate is actually a debate about whether Waldron's category should be recognized, and if so, who decides which speech instances fall within it.

Who decides? This is the question that makes free speech advocates most nervous, and for good reason. Once a decision is made that some speech is harmful enough to restrict, the question of who makes that determination is as consequential as the principle itself. University administrators have their own interests — including donor relations, public relations, and legal liability avoidance — that do not reliably align with either free inquiry or student protection. Faculty governance structures are slow, highly contested, and poorly suited to real-time decisions. Courts apply the First Amendment to public universities but not private ones, creating a patchwork. Student campaigns are energetic and sometimes necessary but are not subject to due process requirements and can be disproportionate. There is no institutional actor in the university system whose incentives reliably produce careful, consistent, proportionate decisions about speech — which is itself an argument both for and against formal speech codes, depending on where you start.

Compared to what? Both sides of this debate often evaluate their preferred policy against an idealized alternative rather than the realistic one. Free speech absolutists compare speech codes to a campus of pure open inquiry — but the realistic alternative to formal restrictions is not unconstrained speech, it is informal suppression, social policing, and the chilling effects that already operate on faculty and students whose views are politically unpopular in any given campus culture. Restriction advocates compare campus speech to an environment of inclusion and full participation — but the realistic alternative to formal protections is not a campus where all harm disappears, it is one where harm is informal, deniable, and harder to address. Chemerinsky and Gillman make this point carefully: the debate is not between free speech and safety but between different institutional configurations of risk, and the question is which harms a given institution is most willing to accept and who bears them.

What sensemaking surfaces

The most important fracture in this debate is not between people who value free speech and people who don't. Both Jasmine and Levi value free speech. Both want inquiry to be genuinely open. They disagree about which power is most dangerous: Jasmine is protecting against the power of entrenched hierarchy, amplified by institutional endorsement, to foreclose certain people's full participation. Levi is protecting against the power of organized political pressure to determine in advance which conclusions are permitted. These are both real power dynamics, operating simultaneously, in the same institution.

The conservative critics and the diversity advocates are both pointing to chilling effects. They just see them operating in opposite directions. Lukianoff and Haidt document the self-censorship of faculty who hold views unpopular with the campus left. Matsuda and Waldron document the silencing of students whose standing as intellectual equals is routinely contested by speech that goes unchallenged. Both accounts are empirically supported. Both represent genuine failures of open inquiry. The difficulty is that designing institutions to address one chilling effect often intensifies the other — formal speech protections reduce the chilling effects on heterodox faculty and may intensify the chilling effects on students whose equal standing is contested; formal speech codes may protect some students' participation while chilling heterodox inquiry. There is no configuration that eliminates all chilling effects. The question is whose silence we are willing to accept.

The debate also surfaces a tension within the free speech tradition itself. Mill's marketplace of ideas imagines participants as roughly equal competitors whose ideas succeed or fail on their merits. Rauch's constitution of knowledge assumes good-faith participants operating within shared epistemic norms. Neither assumption reliably holds in contemporary campus environments, where speakers are often backed by well-funded external organizations with strategic rather than epistemic goals, where social media amplifies campus controversies to national audiences with their own axes to grind, and where the "market" is distorted by vast asymmetries in platform, funding, and institutional support. The free speech framework was developed for a set of conditions that partially no longer obtain; the harm prevention framework was developed for a set of conditions that also only partially obtain. Neither was designed for the specific combination of institutional and technological pressures that characterize university campuses in 2026.

What gets lost in most versions of this debate is the possibility that the problem is not simply "too much restriction" or "too little protection" but a mismatch between the institutional design of universities and the actual conditions under which open inquiry either flourishes or fails. Jasmine is right that endorsement is not neutrality. Levi is right that organized campaigns are not a substitute for argument. Both are right. The question is whether the university has the institutional capacity to maintain the distinction — to be genuinely inclusive without being intellectually conformist, to protect academic freedom without being indifferent to who can actually exercise it. That capacity is not primarily a matter of speech policy. It is a matter of culture, of how senior faculty model engagement with challenge, of how administrators handle conflicts, of whether anyone in the institution is genuinely willing to lose an argument in public. Speech codes are a symptom of that capacity's failure as much as a response to it.