{"id":168,"date":"2026-06-15T17:07:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T17:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanhousingtransition.com\/?p=168"},"modified":"2026-06-15T17:07:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T17:07:11","slug":"majority-of-law-professors-self-censor-to-avoid-campus-backlash-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanhousingtransition.com\/?p=168","title":{"rendered":"Majority of Law Professors Self-Censor to Avoid Campus Backlash, Study Finds"},"content":{"rendered":"

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).<\/p>\n

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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 \u2014 but this new report represents the group\u2019s first foray into law school faculty polling.<\/p>\n

Nearly 70 percent of respondents said they wanted protection under the First Amendment for speech that listeners may find \u201cdeeply offensive.\u201d But 56 percent admitted to withholding controversial opinions to avoid campus backlash.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

William Jacobson, a professor at Cornell Law School and author of the blog Legal Insurrection<\/em>, faced just such a backlash after he publicly criticized the Black Lives Matter movement.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor 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\u2019t 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,\u201d said Jacobson in a statement to National Review.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Twenty two percent of respondents said that they would hold an applicant\u2019s 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\u2019s conservative views against the person. Only 20 percent said they believed a liberal applicant would face similar discrimination from their colleagues.<\/p>\n

Nathan Honeycutt, the manager of polling and analytics at FIRE, shared that this gap between self-attributed bias and awareness of other\u2019s bias is consistent with other polls on university faculty in general.<\/p>\n

Additionally, he noted that this small percentage of professors who self-admit bias could have an outsized effect in law schools.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s 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\u2019s prospects,\u201d said Honeycutt.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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Perhaps most infamously, law students shouted down a bipartisan \u201cfree speech event\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

While conservatives were largely targeted in the last decade or so, the Trump administration\u2019s attack on many universities has been a \u201cwakeup call\u201d for liberals who are committed to protecting free speech, according to Honeycutt.<\/p>\n

Samuel Moyn, a professor at Yale Law School, confirmed this recent shift. Arguably, \u201cYale has been much more institutionally censorious to left-wing than right-wing speech and politics as of late.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joe Cohn, the executive director of the Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech at Yale Law School, agreed.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost administrators that are paying attention understand that threats to academic freedom are real from all sides of the political spectrum in different ways,\u201d said Cohn.<\/p>\n

Despite alarming statistics from the FIRE survey, several have speculated that the current environment in law schools represents an improvement from previous years.<\/p>\n

Moyn, for instance, believes the free speech culture at Yale Law School has undergone a \u201cbig change\u201d in the last three years.<\/p>\n

Though FIRE has not conducted polling on law school faculty before now, Honeycutt guessed that the decade before Trump\u2019s second term was worse than it is now.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe present moment is leading more people to take more principled stands for speech,\u201d said Honeycutt.<\/p>\n

He also highlighted how many more institutions have adopted the \u201cChicago Statement\u201d and the American Bar Association\u2019s Standard 208, which are both statements protecting free expression.<\/p>\n

Still, there\u2019s more work to be done.<\/p>\n

Jacobson hopes that removing DEI practices can help.<\/p>\n

\u201cRip 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,\u201d said Jacobson.<\/p>\n

Honeycutt wants faculty to turn principles into practice. Faculty need to \u201cmodel disagreement and dissent.\u201d<\/p>\n

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In its first survey of legal faculty, FIRE found that conservative professors are especially likely to feel they need to conceal controversial opinions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":167,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education"],"yoast_head":"\nMajority of Law Professors Self-Censor to Avoid Campus Backlash, Study Finds - American Housing Transition<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/americanhousingtransition.com\/?p=168\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Majority of Law Professors Self-Censor to Avoid Campus Backlash, Study Finds - 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