BY DAVID MOSHMAN
Readers of this blog may be interested in three new intellectual freedom case repositories that are now available on the MetaCat Foundation website. Feel free to take a look at them before reading on.
The first repository is the Academic Freedom Gaza Case Repository, which is connected to my book-in-progress, Gaza, Genocide, and Academic Freedom. This is a searchable repository of Gaza-related cases that raise issues of academic freedom, freedom of expression, and First Amendment rights. I add to it regularly. Issues represented include cancellation, curriculum, deportation, due process, employment action, hostile environment, institutional autonomy, political neutrality, public speech, research, scholasticide, and student press.
The second, and by far the largest, repository was made possible by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) Students Under Fire database, which provides more than a thousand cases involving efforts to censor or punish student expression at US colleges and universities in the period 2020–24. MetaCat Foundation has downloaded that database and used it to create a Student Censorship Case Repository (available right below the Gaza repository on the MetaCat Foundation website) with greatly enhanced search capabilities to support teaching, learning, and inquiry about the intellectual freedom of students.
Consider, for example, questions about the political direction of attacks and restrictions on students’ intellectual freedom. Do such attacks and restrictions come from the left of the target or from the right? The short answer is both. But there is nevertheless value in trying to identify and understand general patterns of censorship. The case repository format enhances such inquiry.
Sorting by the political direction of the attack or restriction, we see censorship from the left in 476 cases and from the right in 337, with an additional 201 cases that fit neither pattern. Sorting by year we see, for the years 2020 through 2024, respectively, 250, 172, 207, 203, and 182 cases, showing no clear pattern other than a decline after 2020. But sorting by both year and political direction reveals a striking pattern of interaction: Between 2020 and 2024, cases of censorship from the left dropped from 161 to 52 while cases from the right increased from 38 to 100. In 2020, the vast majority of cases with a political directionality were cases of censorship from the left but the proportion of such cases steadily declined such that censorship from the right was the more common pattern in 2023 and even more so in 2024. There are no data yet regarding 2025, but it seems clear that, with the advent of the new Trump administration in January, the trend toward censorship from the right is escalating.
How can we account for the trend from 2020 through 2024, prior to the current Trump administration? At least part of the explanation, one might suppose, is free speech issues associated with Gaza. This explanation is supported by the present data, which confirm that free speech issues connected with Israel/Palestine became much more prevalent in 2023 and 2024 and that such cases overwhelmingly involved censorship from the right.
The website also includes the Academic Freedom Nebraska Case Repository, which can also be found on the website of the Academic Freedom Coalition of Nebraska (AFCON). This repository, drawing in large part on AFCON records, covers restrictions and attacks on intellectual freedom in Nebraska schools, colleges, and libraries going back over a century.
Explore all three repositories and test your own hypotheses! And contact the MetaCat Foundation if you have ideas for a repository of your own.
David Moshman is a professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
