In a tense moment for free speech, here's how Arizona's college campuses rank
Download mp3 (14.29 MB)Republican lawmakers at the state capitol threatened to gut funding at all of Arizona’s universities over the stifling of free speech on campus. The move came after a failed attempt at Arizona State University to cancel an event with Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
That event happened. But, lawmakers were nonetheless up in arms about ASU President Michael Crow and called for donors to pull their funding from the university.
This isn’t the first time ASU and Turning Point USA have been at odds. Earlier this year, Crow condemned the group after a Turning Point camera crew followed a queer ASU instructor. The two people involved have now been charged with harassment and assault.
And, as the conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas has exploded in recent weeks, the debate over free speech on campus has only become more intense. Pro-Palestinian students at ASU were accused of throwing rocks at the windows of an undergraduate student government meeting recently.
Days later, ASU canceled an event with Palestinian-American U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) only hours before it was set to take place. Students protested the decision.
And two University of Arizona professors were suspended after students filmed them in class allegedly defending Hamas. Those two professors have since been reinstated.
For Alex Morey, it all reaffirms the need for universities to be bastions of free speech — even as it’s becoming more complicated. Morey is director of campus rights advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights, or FIRE.
The Show spoke with her more about it all.
ALEX MOREY: We have seen a really bad free speech climate on college campuses for many years. But what’s been really interesting about what’s happened since Oct. 7 is that it’s brought sort of all of these different simmering issues like right up to the fore. And I think the most interesting thing about what happened on Oct. 7 is that it put universities and students on campus in a position of not really having a correct answer. A lot of university administrators and students, you know, they kind of trend more, more progressive. And we don’t really take a stance on that.
But usually there’s like a progressive “right answer” where universities can weigh in or students on campus typically rally around. And what’s been really interesting about Oct. 7 is there isn’t this perfect answer for universities to say, you know, “We’re really upset that Roe v. Wade got overturned,” or “We’re making sure that everybody gets their COVID vaccine.” There’s not a right answer. So however universities weighed in after Oct. 7, they were sort of the first people we saw getting into trouble. They were getting pushback from donors about being not anti-Hamas enough or not saying exactly the right thing. And then when they were putting out multiple statements, and we at FIRE — free speech people — are going, “Uh-oh, here we go.”
Universities are getting in trouble because … we’ve kind of told them in the past, you know, it’s not a super wise idea to be coming out with social and political statements all the time when you're supposed to be maximizing the climate of free expression for students and faculty on campus. Now they’re reaping what they’ve sown. There have been coming out with social and political statements for the better part of a decade now, particularly since 2020, when that became very en vogue. And now what are you going to do when there’s no right statement to put out? And then over the last few weeks, the tensions have been building.
Usually in these kinds of situations, the crisis happens and then it goes away. But now it is building where students feel like they can’t say what they want. Faculty are getting in trouble for saying the wrong thing. So absolutely, I would say this is one of, if not the most difficult moments for free speech on campus in the last decade.
LAUREN GILGER: That’s so interesting. So it’s all kind of coming to a head in this climate that we’ve seen. For a long time on college campuses, the criticism has been coming from the right, sort of saying like, “You’re not allowing conservative students to voice their views, they feel victimized” or whatever it may be on campus. And now we're starting to see some criticism. On the other hand, from the left as well for some universities, right? Like, faculty at UA were immediately suspended when they were recorded in class speaking out about Palestine. I wonder, what is the right response from a university for something like that, when the political lines seem to be shifting?
MOREY: Well, what I will say is that we are always in the business of telling people like, look, if you don’t fight for the speech that you personally disagree with, you don’t really believe in free speech because there right to say the thing you hate is your right to say the thing you deeply and passionately believe in. And here is how that plays out in real life.
GILGER: Let me ask then about education on this, right? Like there does seem to also be a generational shift in the understanding of what free speech means, what the First Amendment means, right? Like, do you think that students today understand the premise of this in kind of this charged, divisive, social media world that we live in?
MOREY: No, And that is probably the biggest failure on universities’ part. And again, why they are having to face the consequences of some of the choices that they’ve made over the last several decades, which is to begin moving away from focusing on what is the core purpose of the university — to maximize speech and debate among students and faculty, to find knowledge, to seek truth — and instead having some of these other competing priorities, pressure from legislatures, pressure from donors. Then you are muddying the waters for, well, what is allowed on campus, and then what is the purpose of the campus? You’re supposed to be able to have these really robust debates, but if you care more about making sure students never feel upset, for example, then you’re going to make different decisions in line with those priorities. And we’re definitely seeing a lot of that. And it and it crosses political lines, of course, too.
GILGER: Yeah. Let me ask you about ASU, too, and Turning Point USA, this very conservative group. Two people with Turning Point have now been charged with harassment for following a professor who is queer with a camera which ended in a physical altercation. And I should say my mother, who is a former ASU administrator and professor, is on Turning Point’s Professor Watchlist, just for full disclosure. But let me ask you, Alex, where is the line between speech and harassment? Like, is it crossing into violence more often? Are you seeing incidents like this more often?
MOREY: Most of the controversies that we are seeing play out on college campuses do involve protected speech. So even when people are talking about things that other people find upsetting — we’re looking at people saying things at protests or faculty saying things in class — it’s a very clear situation of protected speech. When you get into allegations of violence, like what is being alleged at ASU — and my understanding is that TPUSA denies having engaged in violence, that police are involved. The best thing to do is get the police involved where the allegations don’t just touch on protected speech, but instead involve physical violence, criminality. It’s better for universities not to play cop here and outsource to the real experts.
And so both sides are alleging different facts. And it’s the job of the police to get to the bottom of that and figure out what is going on here. When it comes to the line between protected and unprotected speech, nonviolence, above all, is the vision of the First Amendment. That’s the whole purpose of the First Amendment is to allow us to work through our differences in a democracy using words instead of weapons. So it’s very, very important that students understand that while the First Amendment protects a really wide variety of speech, when you cross the line would be something like a true threat, where you're making a serious expression of an intent to commit unlawful violence. We’re not seeing a lot of that at protests right now that are nonetheless being targeted for censorship.
GILGER: Yeah. Let me ask you, RIRE ranks universities on their free speech policies and practices, right? Can you tell me how ASU and UA generally stack up?
MOREY: Yeah. So what’s really interesting is ASU and UA have really good policies when it comes to student speech. So they get our green light, our highest rating when it comes to policies that impact student expression. Those are the policies on their face. Don’t say anything that could violate the First Amendment or are apt to be abused in a way that could censor student speech. And these schools have also adopted the Chicago statement, which is this gold standard free speech policy statement that says “here at this school, we go beyond the First Amendment in many ways and say that not only will we not punish wrongheaded or offensive ideas, but we welcome them, because here at ASU or UA, we’re the kind of place where these ideas are, you know, welcome to be hashed out.”
We also look at a broader, you know, the free speech climate. We looked at a couple hundred schools recently and how they all rank. An UA, and ASU are in the 70s, 80s — bottom of the top 100. So not terrible. Not amazing. NAU actually — our friends up north at NAU — actually are in the top 20. And we haven’t heard any controversies there, so that's really interesting.
GILGER: That is really interesting.
MOREY: But the schools’ policies are only as good as what happens when they’re put into practice. So we have been kind of on high alert recently with both ASU and UA, trying to figure out if they’re practicing what they preach or putting into practice what they put on paper.
GILGER: That was my conversation with Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights, or FIRE.
