At a rally at Columbia University last week, faculty brandished placards that read “Defend Freedom of Speech” and “Defend Academic Freedom.” One faculty member waved a sign reading, “No appeasement. I’m German. I know where this leads.”
Joseph Howley, an associate professor of classics, said that “attacks” on free speech result in a “chilling effect in the classroom.”
Howley and his colleagues are right, of course. Campus environments in which students fear retribution for speaking their minds are antithetical to the purpose and mission of the academy. A free speech “chilling effect” prevents students from asking important questions and from having to defend their ideas. This produces coddled students who are unable to grapple with life’s complexities and are willing to use violence to assert their will.
Howley and his colleagues are also correct in staging their protest at Columbia. After all, the university ranked 250 out of 251 in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s College Free Speech Rankings for 2025, ahead of only Harvard University. FIRE describes Columbia’s speech climate as “abysmal” due to high levels of self-censorship, disruptive conduct, and low administrative support for speech.
Worse, Columbia earned an “F” in FIRE’s due process rating, with biased investigators and flimsy evidence standards railroading students in disciplinary hearings.
With findings like these, Columbia deserves around-the-clock picketing from civil libertarians everywhere.
But as we know, these and other protests on elite campuses have nothing to do with combating hostile speech climates caused by radical progressivism’s stranglehold. Howley and his ilk have only recently taken up the cause of “freedom” because the federal government chose to withhold funds from Columbia and other universities that persist in implementing policies that truly chill speech. Powerful diversity, equity, and inclusion regimes foment an atmosphere of extreme social coercion and ideological conformity backed up by an unforgiving disciplinary system that punishes dissent.
Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, was wise to acquiesce to the Trump administration’s demands to curb DEI’s dominance — not only because Columbia had no leg to stand on following last year’s riots but because these reforms will cause free speech on campus to flourish again.
If Columbia’s professors truly cared about academic freedom and free speech, they would hold a victory parade outside Armstrong’s office, not a protest.
HIGHER EDUCATION FUNDING SHOULD PRIORITIZE AMERICANS
Joseph Stiglitz, a Columbia economics professor awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, said at Monday’s rally, “For democracy to work, there have to be critics of what the government does. Antidemocratic governments always try to shut down the universities first.”
Stiglitz is right, but these sentiments have no moral weight until Columbia’s faculty practices what they preach. They can begin by dismantling the antidemocratic speech policing, mob violence, and kangaroo courts that have long defined their campus.