With the Trump administration escalating its attacks on universities, many professors and students are increasingly discussing the boundaries of free expression.
Representatives from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, better known as FIRE, visited Northwestern on Thursday night, asking some of these questions: What does free speech really mean, and how prevalent is it on college campuses?
FIRE invited students and faculty to discuss one of the country’s fundamental freedoms: the First Amendment, which promises freedom of speech. However, the discussion at Northwestern quickly revealed that this freedom, while clear in theory, can become blurry in practice.
RYAN ANSLOAN: Ultimately, it is not just about making sure that policies don’t infringe on free speech. It’s about making sure people understand why civil discourse is the correct approach.
That’s Ryan Ansloan, a senior program counsel working on fire’s policy reform team. He explained that the First Amendment protects individuals from government censorship and that any restriction must meet a high bar to be considered constitutional.
FIRE’s mission is to defend individual rights, especially in academic settings. Thursday’s session wasn’t a lecture but a conversation. Students were invited to share, question, and push back. One moment stood out for many in the room. McCormick junior Caleb Nunes is one of them.
CALEB NUNES: Whenever the moderator, proctor, I guess, of this session asked us, like, how often do they feel like free speech principles are kind of consistently applied by students — no one raised their hand. And so I think that a really apparent problem at Northwestern is that students really enjoy when their free speech rights are protected as it relates to whatever issue they’re most passionate about. But whenever it comes to issues in which they might disagree or might not be as passionate about, they’re less willing to kind of come forward and defend those views.
FIRE argues that inconsistency erodes a culture of free speech. The First Amendment only works if it protects all speech equally, especially the unpopular kind. FIRE gave Northwestern’s policies on speech a yellow light, since it says some of those policies are too vaguely written that they restrict legally protected speech. The event also provided a deeper understanding of the protections and limitations of the First Amendment.
NUNES: So I think it’s kind of just like a call for like awareness of how like speech policies, speech codes impact us all in really identical ways. It just, you know, you might not be on the receiving end of like speech restrictions, but someday you might. And so because of that, you should try to apply equally your sort of standards as it comes to protected speech.
Other students focused on the opportunity for conversations that were difficult but also calm and respectful.
NOAH COHRS: I think free speech and civil discourse are really important in building civic community, which is something I think we currently lack on campus. And it was really good to see people working to come together across the aisle and have constructive dialogue.
That was Noah Cohrs, a social policy major. Mutual respect wasn’t just theoretical. According to Cohrs, it was clear in the room.
COHRS: I was happy to see how respectful everyone was towards each other, even though we disagreed with each other sometimes and there were a lot of different viewpoints represented in the room. We were all able to come together and have a civil conversation, and that’s what’s really important.
That spirit of dialogue is central to FIRE’s mission, but students say they don’t always experience it on campus.
Siddarth Sivaraman came to the event with some background knowledge of free expression. But hearing directly from FIRE, he says, gave him a new perspective.
SIVARAMAN: I think it’s been really interesting. From my perspective, I mean, I’ve taken a couple classes on individual civil liberties, like in high school and stuff like that. So, I’m a little bit familiar on the First Amendment, but it’s been interesting to hear from like an expert’s perspective, someone who’s like, this is their job.
So, how does free speech look in theory versus how it plays out at Northwestern? For FIRE, the answer lies in consistency. It is a willingness to defend speech you disagree with, just as fiercely as the speech you do.
ANSLOAN: It is not about what speech is allowed; it is about what speech isn’t allowed. And you have to provide a good reason for that. The default is not, what am I allowed to say?
That message resonated even with students who acknowledged that practicing it can be difficult. In a polarized climate, defending the right to speak can sometimes feel like endorsing the message itself. But for FIRE, that’s where the First Amendment does its most complex and most important work.
Whether students walked away in agreement or not, on this day, the event started conversations that may shape how free speech shows up at Northwestern.
From WNUR News, I’m Rosemary Mbao.
