Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by James Kirchik
“Five years of FIRE surveys demonstrate that the nation’s future leaders harbor a shocking degree of ignorance about America’s uniquely robust free speech principles, content neutrality foremost among them. To be sure, college students are like many other if not most Americans in this regard. Ask any random person on the street if they believe in free speech, and they’ll probably say ‘yes,’ but dig down and you’ll discover that they adhere to the proposition, ‘free speech for me, but not for thee.’ … Particularly disturbing to me in reading this year’s survey is a trend I’ve been monitoring for some time: the persistently lower support for free speech among LGBT students compared to their heterosexual peers.” (06/12/25)