AllStances™: Free Speech on Campus

Do college administrators have a duty to protect students against harmful speech and negative emotional consequences? Or is the purpose of college education to expose yourself to different views and build resiliency against bad ideas?

Explore all perspectives, stances, and arguments for and against free speech on college campuses with AllStances™ by AllSides.

Catalyzed by the “new American left” of the 1960’s, the original free speech movement on college campuses opposed administrators when they censored different perspectives and types of speech. Today, some students now oppose college authorities that permit open dialogue, insisting that certain perspectives and viewpoints are harmful and should be banned.

Should colleges adhere to free speech standards, or should some views be outside the bounds of acceptable speech?

Should hate speech be kept off campus, has it been defined too broadly, or is it not a valid concept at all?

Explore all the arguments, stances and perspectives around freedom of speech at colleges and universities. Keep in mind that stances aren't mutually exclusive — some might have viewpoints that align with multiple stances.

Are we missing a stance or perspective? Email us!

The Stances

Colleges Should Restrict Some Speech to Protect the Vulnerable

• Restrict or prohibit some speakers
• Prevent hate speech
• Moderate speech on school property and related to school matters

Colleges Should Educate Students on Acceptable Speech, Provide Safe Spaces

• Provide classes/resources on hate speech and microaggressions
• Provide safe spaces and free speech zones
• Discourage harmful speech

Colleges Should Not Limit Speech

• Take no action against speech unless it encourages harm
• Do not police speech or create speech codes
• Ignore calls to silence certain speakers or views

Colleges Should Proactively Encourage Free Speech and Debate

• Encourage free speech as a core part of the college education
• Promote viewpoint diversity/traditional view of freedom of speech; 
• Foster healthy arguments and competition of ideas

Colleges Should Limit Some Speech, but Not the Ideas Currently Being Restricted

• Protect conservatives and other ideological minorities
• Restrict the endorsement of far-left ideologies, like communism and socialism
• Return to classical liberal ideas and education

Stance 1: Colleges Should Restrict Some Speech to Protect the Vulnerable

CORE ARGUMENT: Vulnerable students, such as immigrants, racial minorities or members of the LGBTQ+ community, are at risk of trauma when harmful speech goes unpunished. Colleges must take action.

More arguments for this stance:

• Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences. 
• When students express concern and discomfort about speech that is hateful, racist, or noxious in other ways, they are doing nothing unreasonable or historically unprecedented.
• The First Amendment only applies to the government — private universities don’t have to uphold it.
• There is no right to have a platform or to be hosted.
• Some speech can incite physical harm and cause emotional trauma.
• Words can be violence.
• Censorship is the appropriate response to speakers with harmful views so that their ideas don’t spread.
• Colleges should make sure speakers can back up their presentations with facts.
• Colleges aren’t doing enough to protect against harmful speech.
• Racist and antisemitic speech are allowed to spread on college campuses with no consequences.

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Stance 2: Colleges Should Promote Acceptable Speech

CORE ARGUMENT: Colleges should educate students on microaggressions, bias and hate speech. Administrators should provide ways for students to feel safe from harmful speech.

More arguments for this stance:

• We can embrace robust speech across differing views while also committing to principles about civil dialogue on the toughest subjects.
• We should promote intellectual diversity in a way that makes people feel safe enough to challenge each other.
• Regulating hate speech should happen through the informal enforcement of new “norms of civility” on college campuses.
• Students and their families make great efforts and sacrifices to put themselves on our campuses, so we should provide “safe enough spaces.”
• Since bullying and hate speech, especially online, can increase suicide rates, schools should offer courses and curriculum based around hate prevention and anti-bias.
• Schools should develop training programs for students, faculty, administrators, campus police and relevant student leaders about responding to incidents of hate.
• To support marginalized students, practitioners should make an effort to address the barriers associated with marginal identity by calling out microaggressions.
• Once you recognize microaggressions, you can make others more comfortable with discussing and engaging in the topics in question, the end goal being an even more thorough discourse.
• Criticism of trigger warnings often trivializes the trauma some students have experienced.

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Stance 3: Colleges Should Not Limit Speech

CORE ARGUMENT: Colleges should not police, moderate or restrict speech among the student body or faculty unless it encourages physical violence.

More arguments for this stance:

• Banning certain ideas harms the people we wish to protect, weakening us psychologically and preventing us from establishing resiliency.
• There is a correlation between a reduction in free speech (e.g. cancel culture and censorship) and an increase in suicide rates that some think might be causally related.
• Universities should refrain from sanctioning faculty members for saying things that others find controversial.
• Censorship and unjust crackdowns on speech are far too common on college campuses today.
• Federal statute and Supreme Court precedent suggests that public universities are responsible for upholding students’ rights, including their right to free expression.
• Objectively harmful opinions and actions can be more clearly identified, called out and condemned when freedom of speech is permitted.
• Colleges should not discriminate who gets to speak based on their views, and should have a very high bar to qualify speech as harmful.
• Cancellation of certain speakers or ideas is an assault on the liberalism that universities were founded upon.
• “The assumption of freedom of speech, and of academic freedom, is that education is enhanced when there is more speech, not when government officials have the power to censor and punish speech they don’t like.”
• “America is a land rooted in the ideas of a free society: the freedom to be who you are, to speak your mind and to innovate. By silencing our students and young people, we have started down a slippery slope.” 

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Stance 4: Colleges Should Promote Free Speech and Debate

CORE ARGUMENT: Free speech and open debate should be celebrated and enabled by colleges and their administrators. Students and colleges should ignore calls to silence speech.

More arguments for this stance:

• “An open society depends on liberal education, and the whole enterprise of liberal education is founded on the principle of free speech.”
• Committing to public debate on campus would help quell animosity between different groups.
• Schools should get rid of illiberal speech codes, clearly endorse freedom of speech, and maintain those principles amidst challenges.
• Higher education should foster reason and open-mindedness by encouraging free discourse, even if encountering dissent is uncomfortable. 
• At its core, liberalism supports human progress through debate and reform. 
• True equity and inclusion, which many colleges have openly committed to, means including viewpoint diversity, respecting real and meaningful political differences and outlooks, and understanding a multitude of ideas.
• Professors are becoming less politically diverse, which is antithetical to the idea of honest academic and ideological exploration.
• Colleges aren’t doing enough to protect the free speech rights of minority groups, particularly conservatives.
• Public colleges and universities must teach the value of free speech.
• Universities have a responsibility to clearly defend the core mission of the university, which is to make space for members of the campus community to explore ideas.

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Stance 5: Colleges Should Limit Some Speech, but Not the Ideas Currently Being Restricted

CORE ARGUMENT: Marxism and socialism, which oppose the traditionally liberal open exchange of ideas, are invading university culture and curriculum. Colleges should discourage them.

More arguments for this stance:

• Marxism and socialism, which threaten our democratic freedoms by opposing the traditionally liberal open exchange of ideas and a system of equality under the law, are invading university culture and college curriculum in ways that will have long-reaching political, economic, and social ramifications.
• When they don’t adhere to Marxist values, professors have been fired, students have been attacked or harassed, and guest speakers have been shouted down at colleges when they don’t adhere to Marxist values.
• Students indoctrinated with Marxist ideas will enter the workforce and public office, dramatically altering the trajectory of our country.
• Many schools are now committed to "diversity, equity, and inclusion," but there is a problem, or irony, in such statements: Far too many students today self-censor for these stated values of speech and diversity to be truly realized.”
• As graduates of elite American universities move into the workplace, they bring “along tactics to enforce ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and canceling allies who have transgressed.”
• “Universities are following the leftist mandate empowering the state and large corporations to move society forward rather than following their original (conservative) mission of preserving and cultivating what’s best in civilization (like freedom) to empower the individual.”
• Conservatives on campus increasingly feel they must self-censor or else face public ridicule and harassment.
• The repercussions of conservative self-censorship on college campuses will be far-reaching and have already begun to permeate other parts of society, as we have seen with the spread of cancel culture and critical race theory.

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The Author:

Henry Brechter, AllSides Managing Editor, Center bias

Reviewers and Contributors:

Joseph Ratliff, AllSides Daily News Editor, Lean Left bias

Julie Mastrine, AllSides Director of Marketing, Lean Right bias

Matt Byrne, AllSides Director of Dialogue, Center bias

Andrew Weinzierl, AllSides Research Assistant, Lean Left bias

John Gable, AllSides CEO and Co-Founder, Lean Right bias

Antonio Ferme, AllSides Weekend Editor, Center bias