Many college students are heading back to campus this week asking if this year will be different than last. According to Campus Safety Magazine, there were more than 100 colleges around the world where rioting students encamped on campus lawns or otherwise held violent demonstrations against Israel “resulting in student arrests, suspensions, and expulsions.”
Some of these riots shut down campuses and delayed exams, while violent individuals harassed Jewish students at some colleges. Are college officials taking these events seriously? According to the Associated Press, 3,200 individuals were arrested for participating in riots last spring—riots that were in favor of the actions of the terrorist organization Hamas—with a nontrivial number of these offenders being released with little or no punishment. Officials at Brown University, Northwestern, and Rutgers “struck deals” with violent individuals, resulting in limited or no sanctions.
In a review of 106 colleges listed by Campus Safety Magazine (four schools were removed from the list because they are located outside of the U.S.), there is little evidence that school personnel are changing campus policies. Nearly all of the schools still have diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, departments where faculty say they want to promote tolerance but did nothing last spring to quell campus violence. Furthermore, most of the schools have statements purportedly in favor of free speech, policies that, absent administrators’ commitment to following through, also did little to stop the violence or lead to consistent consequences for students guilty of violating school codes of conduct.
Just seven schools, representing under 7 percent of the schools on the list, had easily accessible lists of freshman classes focused on free expression or the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. These findings are consistent with—albeit notably lower than—findings from a report from the free speech advocacy organization Speech First from 2022 that reviewed 51 schools’ new student orientation programs. Speech First found 32 percent of their sample of schools “mention” free speech in their freshman programs.
In a closer examination of Campus Safety’s list, some schools appear to have adopted new academic offerings on free expression in the last school year or are planning new programs for this fall. Dartmouth University hosted a forum on free speech last May, while Vanderbilt University is holding a “Global Free Speech Summit” in October.
For most schools on the list, though, this semester will be business as usual. Some schools have the altogether-too-common seminars of questionable academic value (the University of Colorado-Denver has a freshman class on “The Beatles, Popular Music and Society,” and Tulane University has a course on comic book superheroes’ “race, gender, and orientation”). Others are doubling down on a commitment to DEI. The University of Maryland has a course hosted by the DEI office on “Empowering Activism” and Barnard College has a course on “Feminism and the Politics of Anger.”
Students do not need more of the same. College personnel should require incoming freshman to participate in seminars on free expression, and state lawmakers should consider policies that require public colleges and universities to create such programs. In fact, state lawmakers should consider proposals to suspend or expel students who are found guilty of violating campus speech codes—while calling on local authorities to arrest and remove students who break the law. The Goldwater Institute has created a reform to protect free speech on campus and includes these provisions. Lawmakers in Arizona and Alabama, to name a few, have adopted these policies.
DEI offices have proved to be of no academic value and neither prevented nor resolved the violent activities at schools this past spring. State lawmakers should prohibit school officials from using taxpayer spending on these departments. The Goldwater Institute has designed another reform to help state officials remove these departments. Lawmakers in nearly a dozen states, including those in Florida, Indiana, and Texas, have adopted policies such as these.
The majority of college students did not participate in violent riots last year. These undergraduate and graduate students do not need more of the same this semester—rather, they need university personnel to be committed to campus safety and free expression.
Jonathan Butcher is the Will Skillman Senior Research Fellow in Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation and a Senior Fellow at the Goldwater Institute.
