Free speech is under fire on campus

Forty-five percent of college students say violence is justified to stop "hate speech," according to the Buckley Institute's 2026 National Undergraduate Student Survey, reports Landon Mion of Fox News. Fifty-four percent of students who say they're liberals, 36 percent of moderates and 30 percent of conservatives agree. Nearly half (46 percent) of students supporting shouting down a speaker whose views are offensive, and 40 percent say offensive speech should be subject to criminal prosecution.

Free speech does better on the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s seventh annual College Free Speech Rankings. Only 30 percent of college students say violence is OK to stop offensive speech, reports FIRE. Shouting down a speaker is justified by 69 percent and blocking entry to a controversial campus even is supported by 50 percent.

The numbers are down slightly from last year's peak, said FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff. “But the overall state of free speech on campus is grim. Too many college administrators wield their power to cancel controversial speakers, cave to government or student calls for censorship, and limit academic freedom.”

The University of Chicago is best in the nation at supporting free speech, FIRE concludes, while Texas State University, the University of Washington, and New York University are the worst.

"We cannot claim to stand for sexual freedom and then recoil in disgust when there's a possibility that a young woman simply chose to exercise it," argued two student journalists in in the Columbia Sundial, an independent student publication. The "collective frenzy" in response to allegations of gang rape at a Cornell fraternity party has infantilized women, wrote Christina Ma, a Barnard junior, and Nikos Mohammadi, a Columbia junior, in The 'Cornell Seven' Is Really About Liberalism.

The response was fierce, writes Mohammadi in My classmates want me dead on Unherd. They were urged to commit suicide.

Bizarrely, a college free speech group, the The Columbia Open Discourse Alliance (CODA, condemned the the piece and canceled a free-speech forum because Sundial editor  Nick Baum, had been slated to speak at the event, writes Meagan O'Rourke on Reason.

The event was canceled "not in spite of, but because of [CODA's] commitment to free expression," CODA's president, Aum Desai, told the Columbia Daily Spectator, the university's student newspaper. Apparently, he thought the commentary would "silence" victims of sexual violence.

Columbia graduate Clayton Smith, who founded CODA in 2025, said he was "shocked," reports O'Rourke. "Smith started the organization to create a central hub for groups hosting events promoting free speech and open discourse, including the Sundial and Columbia's Heterodox Academy chapter."

Mohammadi and Ma's commentary was condemned by the Columbia Political Review's editorial board and in a Spectator editorial, writes O'Rourke.

Columbia recently received a failing grade for free speech from FIRE, she notes. "It is clear that some topics remain taboo in the public square."

Cornell's health department authored a guide titled Sexual Pleasure: Finding the “Sweet Spot” that urges students "to explore sexual fantasies, experiment with sex toys, and consider bondage and fetish gear," writes Jared Lederman, a recent graduate. Also "sex positive" are group sex and "ethical porn." Of course, sex is supposed to be consensual. But what if everyone's drunk?