FIRE Poll Shows How Violence Impacts Free Speech on Campus

​Not since 1970, when the Weather Underground emerged from the University of Michigan to unleash a wave of bombings – and the nation witnessed the massacre of students at Kent State – has the American campus seemed so prone to ideological violence. What impact is violence having on students’ attitudes toward free speech?

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) sponsored a nationwide survey of 2,028 undergraduates in October, in the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University (UVU). Some 204 UVU students were included in this survey.

The College Pulse Poll commissioned by FIRE found:

• Half of students say that they are less comfortable attending or hosting controversial public events on their campus.

 

• Forty-five percent are less comfortable expressing their views on controversial topics in class after the murder of Charlie Kirk; 43 percent are less comfortable doing so in common campus spaces, and 48 percent on social media.

 

• Roughly one in five students say they are now less comfortable attending class.

And these results were compiled before a gunman killed two students – at this writing, for reasons unknown – on the Brown University campus on Dec. 13.

Calm Surface, Roiling Emotions

The poll shows that UVU students appear more sensitive to speech rights than their peers, a sensibility born of trauma. The UVU campus, FIRE reports, “appears calm,” but “the survey data tells a more complicated story.”

• Seventy-four percent of students nationally say that the state of free expression in the United States is heading in the wrong direction. By contrast, 86 percent of UVU students believe the environment for free speech is deteriorating.

Confusing Words with Violence

One of the most provocative findings of the national survey is that nine out of ten students agree or partially agree that words can be “violence.” This prompted J.D. Tuccille in Reason to write: “Of all the stupid ideas that have emerged in recent years, there may be none worse than the insistence that unwelcome words are the same as violence.”

We would add some nuances. First, we doubt that all undergraduates immediately grasped the First Amendment implications of this question. Second, it deserves to be said that some speech can inflict wounds and leave lasting scars, much like physical violence. Imagine a drunken father berating his six-year-old daughter in the coarsest, most brutal language imaginable. That’s verbal violence that could lead to a court terminating parental rights.

But we take Tuccille’s point.

Imagine college students triggered into terrified paralysis by a speaker who argues that 19th-century colonialism brought some benefits to the peoples of Africa and Asia, or a professor denouncing Gen. George Washington for ordering massacres of Iroquois villagers during the American Revolution. College students who expect to practice critical thinking need to entertain such challenging thoughts.

“Telling young people who haven’t been raised to be resilient and to deal with the certainty of encountering debate, disagreement, and rude or hateful expressions in an intellectually and ideologically diverse world plays into problems with anxiety and depression,” Tuccille writes. “It teaches that the world is more dangerous than it actually is rather than a place that requires a certain degree of toughness. Worse, if words are violence, it implies that responding ‘in kind’ is justified.”

Is Some Speech So Heinous that Violence Is Justified?

Regarding Tuccille’s last point, perhaps the most interesting result of the survey is that before Kirk’s murder, 81 percent of UVU students responded that using violence to stop a campus speech was “never” acceptable. Now, 94 percent of UVU students believe violence is never acceptable. (We wonder, however, what the remaining 6 percent failed to notice.)
​
The FIRE poll shows that exposure to actual violence – including the impossible-to-unsee silencing of a man who only sought open debate – is making the vast majority of students appreciate the difference between violent acts and provocative speech.

DONATE & HELP US PROTECT YOUR FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS