5/ Here's the final scare. The average campus free speech grade was a D-. Only 24 of 261 schools earned a C or better. I wish I could say I'm surprised. This Halloween, see how scary your school's record is:

@glukianoff I met him once, many years ago now. The story is long but good, but the most important takeaway is: he was every bit as gracious, sharp, warm, and wonderful in person as the most die-hard fan could hope.

Next week, about 550 free speech advocates and thought leaders will descend on Philadelphia for @TheFIREorg's first-ever Soapbox conference. Believe it or not, in FIRE's 27-year history, we've never hosted a general-audience free speech conference. We've hosted student and faculty conferences, but nothing like this. We figured the 250th anniversary of American independence was as fitting a time as any to give it a try. We had no idea what to expect. Would anyone buy tickets? Conference experts told us most tickets are sold in the weeks leading up to an event. Instead, we sold out two months in advance! America's free speech movement is growing, and its members are eager to meet one another. I'll deliver the opening keynote, "The Fight for Free Speech," a nod to the title of the ACLU's first annual report in 1921. The talk will summarize the story I tell in my forthcoming book: how civil libertarians fought to make the promise of the First Amendment a reality. Other speakers include @nickgillespie, @LarryLessig, @prestonjbyrne, @ENBrown, @CaseyMattox_, @chrisbest, @RosenJeffrey, @FreeRangeKids, @sapinker, @Musa_alGharbi, @marcorandazza, @AdamThierer, @DavidAFrench, @whignewtons, the @wethefifth guys, @ishapiro, @noam_dworman, @JohnHMcWhorter, @mtaibbi, and many, many more. I can't wait to see you all next week. And if you can't make it, I hope to see you at the next one. Just be sure to get your tickets early!

5/ Here's the final scare. The average campus free speech grade was a D-. Only 24 of 261 schools earned a C or better. I wish I could say I'm surprised. This Halloween, see how scary your school's record is:

SCOTUS said Dred Scott had no rights as a citizen. Frederick Douglass took that argument head-on, pointing to America’s founding promises. @RebeiroBradley joins @RosenJeffrey on "The Blessings of Liberty" to explore Douglass’s constitutional vision. 👇

The First Amendment starts with a pretty radical bet: people can be trusted with ideas, even bad ones. That experiment has worked out pretty well. Happy Constitution Day to the amendment built on the unfashionable idea that nobody gets the final word on what may be said!

Yeah, and my take overall is that you can believe that the threat is potentially real AND have concerns about onerous regulations that create a monopoly or duopoly or otherwise restrict the right to say, for example, open source AI technology, AND while knowing full well we are in a potentially existential battle with China about who can dominate AI. Indeed, all of these things SHOULD be considered in the analysis. @adgo and I tried to explain a sensible First Amendment approach here, which both addresses the potential of catastrophic harm, which almost exclusively comes from when AI is given delegated authority, from helping keep the state’s grubby mitts off of what counts as knowledge. Also, it's a good reminder that if you place too much hope in the idea that code is speech and the First Amendment protects it, the law is decreasingly on your side. But there are other ways of protecting inquiry, information, knowledge, and truth.

FIRE won a huge First Amendment victory today. And before anyone mischaracterizes it: This ruling does NOT say the government must admit anyone, issue anyone a visa, or grant anyone citizenship. It says that once a person is lawfully here, the government cannot deport them because they engaged in protected speech. The government cannot tell a legal immigrant: An American is free to say this, but if you say it, you’re out. That’s the principle we sued to defend. And today we won.

What if some of the ideas meant to make students feel safer are actually making them more anxious, depressed, and helpless? @theFIREorg data from more than 55,000 students reveals an ideological mental health gap. I break it down on ERI with Andrea Honeycutt:

Talk about an academic finding that replicates that our K through PhD system has encouraged people to actively ignore. We are replicating mistake after mistake that were conclusively shown by the close of the 20th century, precisely because of massive educational failure. And, of course, the people who advocate for policies that inevitably raise costs don't know they don't know that it's a harder problem to solve than it should be.

Everyone should read @Tyler_A_Harper’s extraordinary Atlantic cover story, “Confessions of a Token Black Professor.” It is one of the best accounts yet of how bad American campuses became between roughly 2015 and 2025, peaking from 2020 to 2023. It was a disaster for academic freedom, free speech, and higher education’s credibility. It also helped destroy trust in shared facts, because people stopped believing that our supposed referees would scrutinize claims that fit their own ideology as aggressively as claims from the other side. Now there is a concerted effort to pretend either that none of this happened, or that it was merely a strange youthful indiscretion we can laugh off, much as people tried to do with the first great age of political correctness. We must not let them wish it away. If you experienced the quasi-religious groupthink that overtook institutions supposedly devoted to inquiry, write about it. Record what happened, what people were afraid to say, and why. Otherwise, this period will be rewritten by many of the same people who defended the status quo while casting themselves as brave underdogs. Looking at you, @rottenindenmark, among others. Doing PR work for a $1 trillion industry is not exactly fighting for social justice. I also have always seen this through a class lens. Elite higher education is a gigantic industry that disproportionately benefits people who are already well-off. Yes, people like me can get through it and have our lives transformed. But we are a small part of the story. There is an older intellectual history here. Thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse confronted a frustrating problem: the working class often failed to behave as intellectuals expected and an awful lot of working people hated intellectuals. Ordinary Americans liked their country, distrusted elites, and seemed perfectly capable of living without philosopher-kings directing them. The solution was an newideology that allowed highly educated elites to regard working-class people with contempt while still seeing themselves as champions of the oppressed. That became academia’s problem when universities built departments, bureaucracies, hiring systems, and professional cultures that treated deeply contestable political doctrines as moral dogma. You can see the results throughout Tyler’s story: classism, utter contempt for locals, exaggerated self-importance, ordinary disputes transformed into battles of good and evil, and politicized administrators remarkably skilled at weaponizing elite ideology against their own institutions. Tyler’s piece is both testimony and warning. There are excellent university presidents trying to right the ship, but too many faculty organizations and professional associations still seem to believe the ideology was never the problem—it simply wasn’t imposed consistently enough. We need to document what happened and build institutions less vulnerable to another episode like it. Because this was never some weird, isolated campus disaster. It spread into journalism, science, philanthropy, corporations, K–12 education, government, and politics. It damaged the credibility of the institutions we depend on to tell us what is true. A society that loses faith in its knowledge-producing institutions eventually loses something more important than the reputation of its universities: its ability to see the world as it is.