Majority of Law Professors Self-Censor to Avoid Campus Backlash, Study Finds
A majority of law professors feel that they cannot express their opinions on controversial topics for fear of backlash from students, other faculty, or administrators, according to a new report released by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
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The report, based on surveys with 1,959 law school faculty members, shows an academic environment in which law school faculty endorse First Amendment principles, but struggle to practice them. FIRE is a free speech advocacy group known for its legal work, College Free Speech Rankings, and university faculty polling — but this new report represents the group’s first foray into law school faculty polling.
Nearly 70 percent of respondents said they wanted protection under the First Amendment for speech that listeners may find “deeply offensive.” But 56 percent admitted to withholding controversial opinions to avoid campus backlash.
Conservative law professors, a minority among law school faculty, were overrepresented among those who reported self-censoring, with 72 percent admitting they conceal controversial opinions from students and colleagues.
William Jacobson, a professor at Cornell Law School and author of the blog Legal Insurrection, faced just such a backlash after he publicly criticized the Black Lives Matter movement.
“For criticizing BLM post-George Floyd I was denounced by 21 of my colleagues, by 15 student groups, and by the then (now departed) Dean. While I wasn’t fired, the treatment of me served as a warning shot across the bow of any other faculty member willing to publicly challenge core left-wing political assumptions, particularly as to racial politics,” said Jacobson in a statement to National Review.
A significant majority of conservative respondents (61 percent) reported feeling that the institutional climate they operate in is hostile to their views, while only 11 percent of liberal respondents felt the same.
Twenty two percent of respondents said that they would hold an applicant’s conservative viewpoints against that individual in making a hiring decision, while only 15 percent admitted they would discriminate against an applicant for liberal views. Yet, when respondents were asked whether they believed their colleagues would discriminate against a conservative applicant, more than half (56 percent) said they believed their colleagues would hold the applicant’s conservative views against the person. Only 20 percent said they believed a liberal applicant would face similar discrimination from their colleagues.
Nathan Honeycutt, the manager of polling and analytics at FIRE, shared that this gap between self-attributed bias and awareness of other’s bias is consistent with other polls on university faculty in general.
Additionally, he noted that this small percentage of professors who self-admit bias could have an outsized effect in law schools.
“That’s over one in five, and these faculty committees that are reviewing applicants are pretty small. They provide a recommendation to the department, and even one out of five people can tank an applicant’s prospects,” said Honeycutt.
Pressures on academic freedom and free speech differed between conservatives and liberals. Based on his many conversations with law faculty, Honeycutt shared that conservatives have often felt pressure to censor from inside their own institution, while liberals are now noticing pressure from federal and state governments.
Many incidents of left-wing censorship in the past decade have prompted national attention and criticism. Just last month, protests and disruptions were staged at UCLA law school during an event with James Percival, the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security.
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Perhaps most infamously, law students shouted down a bipartisan “free speech event” at Yale Law School in 2022 due to their opposition to a speaker from the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom. Later that year, Justice James Ho of the Fifth Circuit announced that he would no longer hire law clerks from Yale Law School, citing concerns about the intolerance displayed by students.
While conservatives were largely targeted in the last decade or so, the Trump administration’s attack on many universities has been a “wakeup call” for liberals who are committed to protecting free speech, according to Honeycutt.
Samuel Moyn, a professor at Yale Law School, confirmed this recent shift. Arguably, “Yale has been much more institutionally censorious to left-wing than right-wing speech and politics as of late.”
Joe Cohn, the executive director of the Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech at Yale Law School, agreed.
“Most administrators that are paying attention understand that threats to academic freedom are real from all sides of the political spectrum in different ways,” said Cohn.
Despite alarming statistics from the FIRE survey, several have speculated that the current environment in law schools represents an improvement from previous years.
Moyn, for instance, believes the free speech culture at Yale Law School has undergone a “big change” in the last three years.
Though FIRE has not conducted polling on law school faculty before now, Honeycutt guessed that the decade before Trump’s second term was worse than it is now.
“The present moment is leading more people to take more principled stands for speech,” said Honeycutt.
He also highlighted how many more institutions have adopted the “Chicago Statement” and the American Bar Association’s Standard 208, which are both statements protecting free expression.
Still, there’s more work to be done.
Jacobson hopes that removing DEI practices can help.
“Rip it out by the roots and replace it with an agenda that focuses on the rights and inherent worth of every individual without regard to race or ethnicity. Change the culture, which is the hardest thing to do,” said Jacobson.
Honeycutt wants faculty to turn principles into practice. Faculty need to “model disagreement and dissent.”
