Before the mayhem of the last few weeks, I and my other colleagues at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression had commented that 2023 was the worst year on record for campus deplatforming and 2024 is on track to beat it. In fact, the data consistently shows campus free speech was in peril in 2018, and it has only gotten worse since then. Moreover, the vast majority of these issues have primarily and increasingly come from the leftsince 2018.
This is no surprise, given the daunting series of political and ideological hurdles preventing dissenting students and academics from entering or succeeding in academia — a phenomenon my “Canceling of the American Mind” co-author Rikki Schlott and I call “The Conformity Gauntlet.” Ideological homogeneity, along with administrative hypocrisy and moral cowardice, have caused this anti-free speech attitude on campuses to bubble for a very long time. Since October 7, it’s come to a rolling and sometimes violent boil.