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By Nick Perrino
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
Maybe you're sick of hearing news about Harvard. We can't blame you.
But as free speech defenders, we go where the censorship is. The government picks the targets, not us. And — once again — the government is unconstitutionally targeting Harvard.
You don't have to like Harvard to oppose the government's recent demands of the university.
FIRE has plenty of problems with that "small school outside of Boston." It has been at the bottom of our College Free Speech Rankings for the last two years. We've defended students and faculty rights at the university since our founding in 1999, and we know better than anyone that there's plenty of work to do.
But you can't fight censorship with censorship.
Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security revoked Harvard's ability to enroll international students.
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The protests that greeted Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival a UCLA School of Law in April were not surprising. Law students, especially at highly ranked schools like UCLA, have become notoriously intolerant of disfavored speakers coming to campus — and few institutions are quite as polarizing as DHS in the “Abolish ICE” era. It was striking, however, that the students who organized the interruptions of Percival’s presentation — with heckling, hacking coughs, cellphones, and the occasional profanity — did exactly what “snowflake” students have been ridiculed and denounced for doing when encountering someone they don’t agree with.
What happens when an entire profession can’t see what’s hiding in plain sight in its own data? That puzzle animated Stony Brook University sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s keynote at the Heterodox Academy 2026 West Coast Regional Conference, held recently at UC Berkeley.
The deeper problem, he contends, is not bad-faith activism but a structural one: peer review, editing, and committee deliberation only correct for bias when the people doing the correcting actually differ from one another, and the academy and the press increasingly do not. His full speech is transcribed below.
Two years after protests over the Israel-Hamas war roiled college campuses, resulting in the arrests of more than 3,000 students and faculty, a new study finds that students generally oppose punishing “objectionable speech,” unless they consider it “highly harmful.”
The study, conducted by researchers from the Universities of Pennsylvania and Colorado and Stanford and Columbia Universities and published in April in Science Advances, also found that students’ views of objectionable speech depend largely on whom it is targeted at.
