Some believe academic freedom is primarily a collective right. Others, including me, believe academic freedom is primarily an individual right — a protection often needed by lonely dissenters standing against the collective. Process matters for protecting both conceptions of academic freedom. But only one conception leaves open the possibility that the outcome of that process was wrong. When professors were punished for being communists or for refusing to sign loyalty oaths in the 1940s and ’50s, that was wrong, regardless of the rigor of the process that produced those outcomes. When people seek to vindicate their rights in court — and courts fail to uphold them — that doesn’t negate those rights. Sometimes the process fails us, and we should feel empowered to say so. The process failed to protect Amy Wax’s academic freedom rights, no matter how robust that process was.

Academic freedom exists to protect academics with dissenting or unpopular views from being steamrolled, not to paper over steamrolling. You can't just say the process was followed and shrug.

A @HofstraU professor is facing a disciplinary hearing after calling a colleague’s course proposal “word salad” during a faculty meeting on curriculum changes. What started as academic discussion among faculty has now become a harassment probe.

The biggest limits on campus speech are often written into the rules themselves. We're hiring a Policy Reform Program Counsel to help challenge unconstitutional speech codes and push universities to fix their policies.

Viewpoint diversity is essential to higher education—but what does the data say? Join FIRE for our Faculty Academic Freedom Series where we'll discuss our just-released analysis of faculty political viewpoints. This free interactive webinar on Jun 9, 2026 12:00 PM EST will include a live Q&A so attendees can ask questions and probe deeper into the political viewpoints of faculty members. Register here:

Politically active faculty at elite and flagship universities aren’t just overwhelmingly Democratic. They’re very progressive. Not just NPR-tote-bag-and-recycling progressive, but progressive to the point that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren would sit just slightly left of them by comparison.

More evidence of higher ed’s viewpoint diversity problem. A new @TheFIREorg study finds faculty political donors clustered in a narrow liberal range, with little conservative counterweight. We must remember that the cure can’t be worse than the disease. Universities need to do the slower, harder work of cultivating campus cultures where students and faculty can challenge ideas from the left, right, or center without fear of punishment. That work has to start now.

A win for student journalists at Pensacola State College! The college reversed course and agreed to print a student-created magazine it had previously blocked over LGBTQ content. Public colleges can’t use funding decisions to censor disfavored views.

Larry Bushart spent 37 days in jail for posting a meme on Facebook. I’ve been doing this work for 25 years, and I can honestly say this is the worst First Amendment case I’ve ever seen. Not because Larry threatened anyone. He didn’t. Not because he committed violence. He didn’t. Not because this was a close call. It wasn’t. He posted a political meme — the kind of thing millions of Americans do every day — and local officials decided to treat it like a crime. And because they had badges, prosecutors, jail cells, and the terrifying machinery of the state behind them, they got away with it for 37 days. Larry is a retired police officer and National Guard veteran. The meme he shared quoted Donald Trump’s “we have to get over it” comment after a 2024 Iowa school shooting. Whatever you think of Trump, the meme was plainly political commentary. Perry County officials knew what it referred to. They knew it wasn’t a threat against a Tennessee school. They arrested him anyway. In the middle of the night. They set his bond at $2 million. He lost his job. He missed family milestones. He sat in jail for more than a month before the charges finally collapsed — because, of course, there was no crime here. Today, @theFIREorg secured a measure of justice: Perry County agreed to pay Larry Bushart $835,000 for violating his constitutional rights. This case should scare the hell out of people across the political spectrum. Because if the government can jail you for a meme by pretending not to understand obvious political commentary, your rights are only as secure as the good faith of the most authoritarian official in your town. That is exactly why we have the First Amendment. Not for speech everyone likes. Not for opinions that flatter the powerful. Not for the bland, safe, committee-approved stuff. It exists for moments when fear, outrage, politics, and authority all line up and say: “Surely this is the exception.” No. It isn’t. I’m incredibly proud of @theFIREorg’s legal team. And I’m even prouder of Larry Bushart for refusing to let the government get away with treating his constitutional rights like a suggestion. But despite the correct verdict, I'll probably always get angry every time I think of this case. Let’s make this the last time anyone in America is arrested — let alone thrown in jail — for a meme. Celebrate your independence. Defend your First Amendment. fire.org/news/victory-tennes…

Last year, the police jailed Larry Bushart for 37 days on a $2M bond for posting a meme after Charlie Kirk’s murder. With our help, Larry sued Perry County, TN, and its sheriff for violating his rights in retaliation for his protected speech. He has received a $835K settlement.

LAWSUIT: Americans have the right to know if our government is maintaining a secret database of people who have protested the administration’s immigration policies. We requested these records from the Department of Homeland Security, but it failed to respond, so we’re suing.

No American should be comfortable with the President of the United States accusing a reporter of treason for critical reporting.

What began with a one-line email has now escalated into multiple investigations, six disciplinary charges, and a second @BowdoinCollege hearing on whether student Finley Rhys can return to campus. We’re appalled by how far this retaliatory crusade has gone.

Every attempt to shut down campus speech should trigger an independent investigation asking two questions: 1) Did administrators do anything to stop the censorship? 2) Did administrators do anything to encourage, excuse, or facilitate it? Students are responsible for their own actions. But the deeper scandal is administrative complicity. In a healthy university, the answer to right-wing demands to fire a professor would be: “No way.” And the answer to left-wing attempts to shut down a speaker would be: “Not on my watch.” Does that sound fanciful? At this point, probably. Because it has become hard to imagine administrators actually acting this way. The dirty little secret is that too many of them have enabled this for years. Some are hired into ideological jobs built around policing speech, running BRTs, and managing “harm” rather than protecting open inquiry. Sometimes the damage comes through omission: refusing to punish obvious censorship. Sometimes it comes through commission, as at Stanford Law School several years ago, when administrators actively helped the shutdown along. Here, it looks like a combination of both. So yes, blame the students. They are adults, not infants or automatons. But look squarely at the administrators who are supposed to defend academic freedom and freedom of speech—and who too often undermine those values instead. We have long since passed the stage where tolerated—and often facilitated—shutdowns and shoutdowns can be treated as somehow distinct from university policy. If campuses allow, and especially if they facilitate, the systematic silencing of locally unpopular points of view, that should not be treated as some weird tragic coincidence. They have the power to stop it. They don’t. Worse, they often train students to think like censors and then protect them when they act that way. Until universities prove otherwise, the systematic shutting down of unpopular voices on campus should be understood as formal—or at least semi-formal—university policy.

A dean at @UCLA_Law warned campus @FedSoc members not to identify the students who tried to shut down their event — even as those same disruptors named FedSoc attendees online without admin warning. If this is how we’re training future lawyers, we’re all in trouble. 📰: @nypost

ABC's refusal to quietly allow the federal government to dictate the range of viewpoints it may air without fear of retaliation is welcome and commendable. The Federal Communications Commission is not and cannot become the nation's censor-in-chief, as its Chairman once recognized. The First Amendment will protect the private institutions that fight back against the executive branch's speech policing. FIRE will fight to keep the government from deciding for us what we are free to say, see, and hear.

Conservative advocacy groups and lawmakers in Utah pressured @UVU to disinvite Sharon McMahon from speaking. The school’s funding was openly called into question. People threatened violence. The censors won. This is exactly the kind of deplatforming and heckler’s veto that we at @TheFIREorg have joined with conservatives to oppose for decades. Censorship is a bipartisan problem. Too many people across the political spectrum loudly proclaim their support for free speech when their side benefits, but eagerly censor when they have the power to do so. These are the free speech hobbyists: Their support comes and goes based on convenience. “Free speech for me but not for thee” has always been with us. As McMahon concludes, “Rights are easy to praise when they cost nothing. The test comes when defending them requires protecting speech you would rather not hear.” Do you pass the test?

UCLA law students shouted down a speaker from the DHS. Then administrators warned Federalist Society students they could face discipline for publicly identifying the disruptors in an already-public video.  A law school should be teaching students how to argue with opposing views, not silence them.

A California school forced student journalists to archive reporting on a named French national in the Epstein Files and her alleged ties to local companies after she threatened to sue. This violates both the First Amendment and the state’s Student Free Expression Act.

Last week, Pensacola State College told a professor her students couldn’t publish stories with LGBT content in a student magazine, arguing they would violate Florida’s dystopian Stop WOKE Act. The school has until the close of business today to respond to FIRE’s First Amendment concerns.