BY JOHN K. WILSON

Last week, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) released a new database of more than four hundred “Scholars Under FIRE” since 2015 and announced it in breathtaking terms starting with the headline: “REPORT: 3 in 4 campaigns targeting faculty expression result in punishment.”

In reality, this three-in-four number included any case where a scholar is investigated. Most people would never imagine that an investigation resulting in no punishment could be described as “result in punishment.” Yes, disciplinary investigations can have a chilling effect and colleges need to dismiss meritless cases quickly when free expression is attacked, but FIRE needs to be more careful in its tendency to frame everything in the most alarmist way possible.

Other claims made by FIRE’s report are also dubious:

–“Scholars in higher education who were targeted for their expression have quadrupled since 2015”

–“A quarter of such attacks result in scholars losing their job”

–”Most campaigns (62%) came from the political ‘left’ of the scholar” vs. 34% from the right.

I’m deeply skeptical of these assertions, because I believe that FIRE is dramatically undercounting the cases since 2015 of attempted repression (which probably number in the many thousands).

Even when FIRE does list punishments, the basis for this sometimes is weak, such as listing a “resignation” as a punishment. Voluntarily leaving a job is not the same as being punished. For example, one of the successful “punishment” cases in the database is Carol Swain at Vanderbilt. But Swain was never punished for her views, and her voluntary retirement in 2017 came two years after some leftist students had denounced her. Obviously, some resignations are made under pressure, but quitting isn’t always evidence of repression.

Some of FIRE’s designations are also puzzling. Teresa Buchanan, who was fired by Louisiana State for swearing in an education class, is designated as an attack “from the left” even though restrictions on bad words are a classic conservative approach. 

But the biggest problem with FIRE’s database is what it omits. A few individual cases are intentionally omitted by FIRE. Melissa Click was fired by the University of Missouri, but Inside Higher Ed reported that “Because Click physically obstructed members of the news media from covering a protest, FIRE says, her speech was not protected.”

There is no doubt that Click was fired because of political intervention and in part because of outrage over her political views (including an incident where she swore at a police officer). The fact that she also did something deserving of criticism should not excuse a politicized firing without due process. Plenty of the professors in FIRE’s database could be deemed to have done something wrong or committed some minor violation of the rules. Once FIRE gets in the business of judging good victims and bad victims, it can create a bias in their database.

Some of FIRE’s judgments about what to include and exclude are questionable. As John Warner points out, the largest number of incidents this year in the database occurred when four Stanford professors criticized the Hoover Institution and wrote, “We are not proposing to constrain the Hoover. What we are asking is simply for an impartial committee to be appointed by the Committee on Committees to delve deeper into the relationship between the Hoover and Stanford.” Although I sharply criticized that faculty report, it’s very difficult to consider a report by four professors calling for a committee to look at the role of an independent institute as a demand for repression, and even more difficult to consider it an attempt to punish the seven fellows mentioned in the report, as FIRE does by including it seven times in the database.

FIRE’s approach to the Stanford case stands in sharp contrast to what happened at Boise State in 2021, which appears nowhere in the database. Boise State suspended fifty-five sections of a class, taught by nearly forty different faculty members, for more than a week because of a false rumor that one conservative white student had been treated in a nasty way by other students. The omission of the Boise State case from the database is even more surprising because FIRE has been leading the way in speaking out about this injustice. Certainly, a suspension of a class (and a ban on class discussions for the rest of the semester) constitutes a serious punishment. Presumably, FIRE omitted Boise State from the database because no specific professor was targeted—but that made the mass punishment even worse, not better. It’s difficult to understand why a mere request to examine the relationship between Hoover and Stanford can make up seven incidents in the FIRE database, while an actual suspension and investigation of fifty-five classes at Boise State doesn’t count. 

The bigger problem is a decision by FIRE to omit death threats from its database. According to FIRE, “We define a targeting incident as a campus controversy involving efforts to investigate, penalize or otherwise professionally sanction a scholar for engaging in constitutionally protected forms of speech. Our definition of a targeting incident does not include instances in which the scholar is subjected to harassment and/or intimidation, including death threats, but does not face an attempt at being professionally penalized or sanctioned.”

Does anyone imagine that a scholar receives systematic harassment and death threats but absolutely no one bothers to email the university to say they should be punished? FIRE quotes the AAUP report on targeted faculty to show the extent of the problem, noting that “83 of the faculty surveyed (40%) reported that they were harassed and received threats of harm and physical violence. Among these faculty members, 39% curtailed their social media presence, 12% changed their teaching, and 6% made changes to their research,” but it appears that FIRE didn’t ask for information about the faculty in the AAUP’s survey.

Perhaps FIRE ought to contact the colleges where scholars received death threats and other harassment, and find out if anyone called for the professor to be punished by the college. I’d be willing to bet that this happened in nearly every case. In fact, the AAUP could follow up with the scholars they surveyed, asking them if they know whether this happened, and forward the information to FIRE to update the database.

If FIRE’s database is trying to measure the extent of chilling effects on academia, it is hard to justify the “death threat” exclusion. Surely a random idiot emailing a university to advocate professional sanction is less significant than a random idiot emailing a scholar a threat to kill them. 

Of course, including the threats to scholars would shift FIRE’s database in important ways. It would dramatically increase the size of the database, requiring an enormous amount of additional work. It would substantially reduce the proportion of attacks that result in punishment. It would dramatically increase the number of attacks that come from the general public (which are only a small fraction of those that some from students in the FIRE database). And it would probably shift the ideology of the attackers, so that a majority comes from the right rather than from the left. None of this would fit with the larger narrative FIRE has consistently advocated about repression on campus.

This is not the first time that FIRE has launched a database of campus censorship with broad generalizations against the left that turned out to be inaccurate. Back in 2014, FIRE created its “disinvitation database” with a similar announcement that disinvitations have “risen dramatically,” that leftist students were the primary censors, that conservatives were about twice as likely to be disinvited as leftists, and that nine of the top ten targets for disinvitations were conservatives. It turned out, FIRE’s initial conclusions were inaccurate. It took me a few hours of research to uncover three left-wing speakers (Ward Churchill, Norman Finkelstein, and Bill Ayers) who had each faced more disinvitations than the conservatives on FIRE’s list.

To its credit, FIRE updated its database to include the examples I found. And that had a dramatic impact on the numbers. When Sean Stevens did an analysis for Heterodox Academy of the FIRE disinvitation database from 2000–2016, he found that there were actually more successful campus disinvitations from the right than from the left, the exact opposite of what decades of alarmist claims (including from FIRE) would indicate about censorship on college campuses.

Just as with its disinvitation database, I think that if the missing cases are added to the Scholars Under Fire database, it will show that threats to scholars come from all sides (albeit slightly more often from the right). But FIRE’s report also makes a serious mistake in treating campus censorship as coming either from the left (62 percent) or the right (34 percent), and ignoring the real importance of censorship from the center. Even if leftists or conservatives initiate the calls for censorship, it is ultimately centrist administrators who usually impose the actual punishments. We need to stop blaming students for everything just because a few radicals speak out publicly, and start blaming the administrators who actually commit the wrongdoing in punishing faculty for their views.

We should help FIRE improve the accuracy of its database (or create our own databases, if they won’t), and we need to correct some of the inaccurate generalizations FIRE is promoting. But we also need to work to stop the intimidation and censorship of scholars for their political views, regardless of who is doing the repression. That means convincing the left and the right (and the center) to embrace the ideals of free expression and to be willing to defend the other side. It means implementing better policies to protect academic freedom and ensure that due process is protected. And it means working to create a campus culture (and a global culture) that rejects censorship. Despite its flaws, the Scholars Under Fire database is chilling evidence of a massive number of attacks on professors in recent years–a fact that is even more frightening given how FIRE omits some of the worst problems with campus censorship. 

John K. Wilson is a contributing author at AcademeBlog.org; a 2019-20 Fellow at the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement; the author of eight books, including The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education and Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies; and a Heterodox Academy Writing Fellow.