Free Speech in Higher Education: A Conversation with FIRE on Institutional Integrity and Mission:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 299 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. Sean Stevens

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast  299

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

Welcome to Changing Higher Ed^®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

[00:00:31] Welcome & Introducing Dr. Sean Stevens (FIRE)

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. My guest today is Dr. Sean Stevens. He is FIRE’s chief research advisor. For those of you who don’t know FIRE, it is the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Sean obtained his PhD in social psychology from Rutgers in 2013 and since then, continued his work with Rutgers and also was the founder of Heterodox Academies, he was the first director of research where he developed a Campus Expression Survey. Five years later, he joined FIRE as its senior research fellow to run the college free speech rankings.

For almost two decades, Sean’s research has focused on an understanding on how moral convictions produce motivated reasoning within a political domain, how this motivated reasoning can distort research and social sciences, and how motivated reasoning can lead to political intolerance and create obstacles to political compromise. Sean joins me today to talk about free speech on campus and what higher ed leaders can do in today’s political environment to ensure free speech stays in place.

One note, whether you lean left or right, free speech is part of the first amendment of our constitution as a critical element to the education of our younger generation. To that end, the change leader works with colleges and universities from all spectrums, and as such does not endorse any political leanings. And comments expressed by guests are theirs alone. As a saying goes, take what you want and leave the rest.

Sean, welcome back to the program.

Sean Stevens: Yes, thanks for having me back. I think we had a great time last time, so looking forward to it.

[00:02:14] Sean’s Role at FIRE & Research Background

Drumm McNaughton: We did, and there’s all sorts of new stuff going on with your institution, FIRE, with campus speech, all sorts of interesting stuff. So let’s kick it off before we get started. Little background on you, sir.

Sean Stevens: Yes. So I am the Chief Research advisor at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. I have a PhD in Psychology from Rutgers University in New Jersey. I then did a postdoctoral fellowship with Rutgers and Stanford where I studied at the Center for Advanced Studies in behavioral sciences.

Learned a lot about survey methodology and things like that. And basically now I am involved in and direct all of FIRE’s research both on and off campus.

[00:03:03] How He Got Into Campus Free Speech Work

Drumm McNaughton: How did you get into this area? Because in our chats before we talked a, lot about how politics is affecting higher education, things like that. How did you get into this business? It’s fascinating to me.

Sean Stevens: Yes. So my original ambition and goal was to be a tenured college professor. It’s fun, it’s a nice cushy job. You can’t get fired.

Drumm McNaughton: It depends on what state you’re in now, my friend.

Sean Stevens: Now it might depend. Yes. But, back 20 years ago when I was like, hey, this is maybe what I want to do, that was the initial goal.

[00:03:41] Academia’s Incentives, Reputation, and ‘Off-Limits’ Questions

Sean Stevens: And then, you get into, you start to get into the nitty gritty of academia and it, yes, it can be a great job, but just like any other job there’s like a pecking order. There’s a social reputational system at play. You want to get into grad school, you need writers of recommendation. Once you’re done with that, you need, you, you want to get a job after that. You need writers of rec, so people need to like you. And when I was in grad school, I you’re told to seek out gaps in literature or holes.

And so one gap I saw was it’s like, well, there’s all this scholarship on authoritarianism, but they literally call it right wing authoritarianism.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, that’s the literature, right?

Sean Stevens: Yes. And it’s there’s plenty of people that aren’t right wing, that act in a fairly authoritarian way as a psychologist, like observing that.

I’m like, okay, so like, maybe this is a, this could be a topic, or this is a gap or a hole. And it was eh, maybe you wait till tenure, till you study that, people don’t really like talking about that. And I then started just get interesting into kind of like, why, like why is that? For a field that, you know, prides itself on we’re going to dig into things, we’re going to be open-minded, nothing’s off the table. It seems like there were some things off the table.

Sure. Is in pretty much every—

Yes, of course.

—situation you’re in, it is.

Of course. Yes, of course there is. And so I then started to, it was like, so why? And then it’s almost like I got into the psychology of scholars and academics and what that is. And Yes, you realize that it’s just like any other field. There’s like the dominant viewpoints.

If you’re pushing against that, it’s going to be a little difficult.

[00:05:25] Straddling Academia and Advocacy: Heterodox Academy to FIRE

Sean Stevens: But I also think I’ve been very lucky in a sense of, I’ve found a lot of people that are older people and mentors that I’ve been able to work with who do very good scholarship and remain in academia and I’ve brought that with me into the work, into the I kind of straddle these worlds now, because FIRE and my previous job at Heterodox Academy both encouraged me to continue to collaborate with faculty scholars in the Academy on research projects. I almost feel like I get the best of both worlds.

I don’t have to deal with the university bureaucracy, but I’m still encouraged to do all the, I’m still encouraged to be like a scholar and it’s been real fun.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, well, you do a good job of straddling the fence. Aren’t many people who can do it. You’ve done it.

[00:06:14] Why Data Matters: FIRE’s Evidence-First Approach

Drumm McNaughton: But what impresses me about the work that you’ve done at FIRE is you bring a research bias to your work. You don’t just go out there and say, this is what’s happening. You say, this is what’s happening, and here is the research that proves that this is true.

Sean Stevens: Here’s the data that backs it up.

Drumm McNaughton: And this is so critical with the topics that you and FIRE get into about free speech, academic freedom, all of these kind of things. Anybody can sit out there and scream at the top of their lungs, this is wrong, et cetera. You don’t have to scream. You can say, this is wrong. This is what the data is showing us is happening. You draw the conclusions for yourself.

Sean Stevens: Yes, and that’s largely I’ll say , I’m happy that, that’s how you interpret what’s been done. Because that’s pretty much been what I’ve been trying to do. It’s, hey man, these are the facts and sure we could disagree over what these facts might mean or how to interpret them or whatever, but here’s the data.

And the point was to just keep piling up the data. People are skeptical about a problem. We’ll just keep pointing out that, hey, more and more, here it is. At some point, the pile of evidence gets too big for people to ignore. And then maybe you also get, shifts in the political winds that help some people realize that’s happening too.

Drumm McNaughton: And in many respects, it needs to be recognized more.

[00:07:42] Record-Setting Year: What the Numbers Say

Drumm McNaughton: Let’s talk about the data, because last year was a record setting year in campus censorship, at least according to your research.

Sean Stevens: Yes, it’s pretty bad is what we could say.

[00:07:56] Inside FIRE’s Three Censorship Databases

Sean Stevens: So at FIRE in our research department, we maintain three different campus databases that track the outcomes of speech controversies on campus. We have a de-platforming database. This is mostly attempts to get speakers invited to campus canceled, have their talk canceled. It can also include things like art exhibits, movie screenings, play performances. It’s not only speakers, but the majority of the entries are going to be invited speakers to campus. Other second database we have is called Scholars Under FIRE. This deals primarily with faculty who face pressure from either actors inside, on campus or off campus, to get them punished for something they’ve done or said or researched. We call it SCOURS because it’s not limited to professors. It could be postdoctoral researchers, research fellows, PhD students. The idea is it’s anyone who’s living effectively the life of an academic and seems like they’re going to stay in the academy in some way. And then the third one is Students Under FIRE, which tracks attempts to sanction individual students and student groups.

The student database only goes back to 2020. The other two go back to the beginning of the 21st century. We have a couple incidents in the de platforming one from even the late nineties.

[00:09:15] Government-Driven Censorship Spike (1998–2025)

Sean Stevens: But to, to your point, basically that was a long-winded buildup to, in the prior 27 years from, say, 1998 to 2024, we recorded roughly 225 attempts to sanction speech on campus that involved government actors. So this could elected officials, it could be people appointed, could be state politicians, could be people at the national level, even the President, et cetera. In 2025, we recorded almost 240.

Wow.

In one year.

[00:09:52] Naval Academy Book Removals & DEI Order Fallout

Sean Stevens: And I’m also treating a mass censorship incident at the US Naval Academy, which involved temporary removal of almost 400 books, most of which were written by professors, from their library so no one could access them. Most of them were put back at some point, but I’m treating that as one incident. So if we treated each of those as an individual one, we’re probably over, we’re over 500 last year. I think it’s probably fairer to treat that just as one. They seem to do a really bad search in how they filtered for these books because the idea was, okay, based on the DEI executive order that President Trump issued, we need to remove all these books that talk about, the woke agenda with race and gender and all this. But they also removed books like The Man Who Would Be Queen by Michael Bailey, which essentially says people who identify as transgender have autogynephilia and it’s a psychological disorder. I’m pretty sure they didn’t want to remove that book.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. Yes.

[00:10:53] Direct Censorship vs. Self-Censorship (and How to Measure It)

Drumm McNaughton: So how much reporting do you include in self-censorship? Or is this just direct censorship?

Sean Stevens: So the databases themselves really only involve attempts to directly censor expression. But when we survey both undergraduates and faculty members, we ask directly, we give them a definition of what we mean by self-censorship, and we ask them directly how often they do it in various settings.

And we also ask about it in like indirect kind of ways where we’re not necessarily like implying that it’s self-censorship, but it’s basically like, how often do you like not say something because of how someone would react. And so we do collect polling data from students and faculty on that.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, but that, I would expect that is more subjective, which may be one of the reasons why it doesn’t get included in the direct counts for the three categories before.

Sean Stevens: And also it’s the absence of something is hard to measure, right? If you self-censor, you’re not speaking. So, Yes. So that’s a thing. But I, I think it’s a thing that is it’s a little more dispositional, like some people are just shy, some people are open books, right? It can move around. But the numbers we have on rates of self censorship stay fairly steady over the years, it seems like.

[00:12:13] Political Trend Shift: From Left-Led to Right-Led Censorship Attempts

Drumm McNaughton: So with this record setting data, have you seen any particular trends?

Sean Stevens: Yes, we have. So up until this year, the majority of attempts to go after speakers came from the left of the expression. I’m not going to, it’s not on the political left. It’s more like the people trying to get the expression censored are more left than the actual expression. So it could be right wing speech, it could be moderate liberal speech, whatever.

In 2025 that shifted. We saw a lot of it, a lot more attempts coming from the right of the expression. That shift started a little earlier in the other two databases that track faculty and students. But it went in terms of faculty, it became massively skewed last year. To the point of there being almost, very few attempts coming from the left of the expression and most of them coming from the right.

Students it’s a toss up and make more of a mixed bag.

[00:13:18] Who Gets Targeted: SJP, TPUSA, and ‘Equal Opportunity’ Cases

Sean Stevens: But what I’ll mention and it’s interesting, and this is probably the only thing these groups have in common. The two most targeted student groups on campus in our database are students for Justice in Palestine and Turning Point USA.

Drumm McNaughton: Interesting, so you’ve got one example from the left and one example from the right.

Sean Stevens: Yes. Yes.

Drumm McNaughton: , Equal opportunity censorship.

Sean Stevens: Yes. Yes. Basically.

[00:13:44] Aftermath of the Charlie Kirk Assassination: Social Media Firings

Sean Stevens: And then on that, I’ll add since I mentioned TPUSA, something we did see in the last three, four months of the year last year, which was I think around when we spoke last time in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination, we recorded almost a hundred attempts to get scholars sanctioned.

Mostly due to things they said on social media about the assassination. All of it was protected speech, it is speech that I would say, hey man, maybe you want to say this to your buddies at the bar and not broadcast it on social media. You do you. It is protected so you shouldn’t be punished for it.

But there was these mass calls to punish a lot of these professors and about 20 of them did get fired.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes.

Sean Stevens: Yes.

[00:14:28] Why People Say the Worst Things Online: Dehumanization & Distance

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, it always amazed me, and I’ve seen this since, well, let’s put it this way, a long time. When the internet first came out, and then Chatboards and all that, for some reason people thought that they could speak with impunity because they were not speaking directly to someone, quote unquote.

Sean Stevens: Yes.

Drumm McNaughton: And I don’t understand why. Because your reach is so much greater on social media, why you would think that saying something like, he deserved to be killed or whatever, why someone would think that is appropriate speech. Protected? Yes. Appropriate? Absolutely not.

Sean Stevens: Yes, some of that is, I’ve thought about this from like the psychological perspective a little bit, and like as you pointed out, when we started as the internet and you’re just in chat rooms and comment boards, which is much different from social media. It’s not happening with the same speed.

But it still is, even this, you and I are, we can see each other visually. We could see each other’s reactions. We could see our body language. In a chat room, on a comment board on social media, you’re not getting that. So you don’t, you can’t even, you don’t even get that like, oh wait, I just made someone uncomfortable by what I said, based on their facial reaction or their body language.

And so , you lose that and then it’s just easier to dehumanize people in that. Like you say something nasty and you can just walk away. You could just type something nasty and just like walk away and never bother to go see if the person even followed up. You could just be like, I’m done.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, and hence the origination of cyber bullying.

Sean Stevens: Yes.

Drumm McNaughton: You can do this kind of thing. Whereas if you did it face to face, there could be some, there could be some serious retribution.

Sean Stevens: I’m about to turn 44 and I’ve played hockey since I was five. So Yes, if you do something like that face to face there could be some consequences that are very different from on the computer.

Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. That, that stick check can be pretty interesting. It’s like, oh, I didn’t mean to do that, oh yes I did.

[00:16:46] What Presidents Can Do When States Pass Censorship Laws

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, so we’ve talked about the censorship that’s going on. The college students, more than half of them report being censored.

Sean Stevens: Mm-hmm.

Drumm McNaughton: What are presidents and senior execs, what are they supposed to do about this? When you’ve got 15 states that have passed 21 laws, censoring higher education in 2025. What are presidents supposed to do?

They’re in a bad spot.

Sean Stevens: They’re in a bad spot. On, on some levels, and I wouldn’t indict every administrator on this or every college president on this. There are some, there are good ones there. There definitely are.

There’s a lot of good ones out there.

There, there’s a lot of good ones.

[00:17:31] Higher Ed’s Reckoning: Ideological Skew and Missed Warning Signs

Sean Stevens: But I also feel like in some ways, in some ways higher ed has brought the reckoning on itself.

There were people within academia raising the alarm bells about this for at least 10 years, if not longer. Going back, you could go back to 2010 or, one of my mentors, Jon Haidt, at the top social psych conference basically was like, okay, how many of your people in here are liberal and how many of your people are conservative?

And it was like 800 to three or something like that. And he was like, okay, like I, I don’t care that these are the views, but he is like, this is a problem. Like this is a problem. Because there’s just certain questions that aren’t going to be asked because we don’t have people from certain perspectives.

And we’re not going to identify certain questions as important because we’re not thinking that way, whereas other people would. So you’ve had people warning and raising the alarms on this for a fairly long time. And a lot of people, I think, was just like, oh, it’s just a right-wing panic or it’s a media creation, it’s a this or that. And this was building, building. And part of our data shows this, and people sometimes criticize us for saying, we highlight these things, but no, it was just building. It continued to just increase and increase.

At some point you got to do something about it. And by not, by somewhat falling asleep at the wheel, I guess I would say, the actions happening now while, FIRE, we oppose them and we’re suing on a number of these grounds and trying to help the universities on this. You did invite it to an extent.

And so I think a real reckoning is like, hey, we should stand up to this. And you need to stand up to it. I think what Harvard’s doing is much better than what Columbia is doing. Although at great risk to themselves for sure. But they’re trying to lead. They are trying to lead and that’s what needs to happen in these cases because these laws and these bills and these orders are not constitutional.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, you’re right on that. And you’re right in that higher ed has skewed very much to the left. I was about to say the right and said, no, that doesn’t sound right. I’m right. It’s gone to the left.

[00:19:45] Teaching Students to Think: Exposure to All Sides & Civil Disagreement

Drumm McNaughton: No, but higher ed I think in many respects, and I speak for myself as well, we have forgotten what our mission is. What our responsibilities are as educators. You can talk about it from preparing the whole student. We get so focused on STEM, we forget about liberal arts educ—

Sean Stevens: The liberal arts and the humanities and

Sean Stevens: And the classics,

Drumm McNaughton: So there’s that part of that. But the other part of it is we’re supposed to train people how to think critically. And we’re not doing that if everything is skewed to the left, and it’s like, no, the right folks, they’re dumb, they’re stupid, et cetera. No, that’s not the case.

Sean Stevens: Presenting it that way does not do anybody a good service at all.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, it doesn’t win friends and influence people, as my parents used to tell me.

Sean Stevens: Yes, no. It doesn’t, and it also, it does a disservice to the student. Because look, you’re going to encounter those ideas when you get out in the real world.

Mm-hmm.

Right? Like, like conservative ideas are not going away.

They’re out there.

And they shouldn’t go away.

And they shouldn’t go away. But the second you leave the university and the bubble that it can be, you’re going to encounter these in your professional setting. Like you just are.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes.

Sean Stevens: You go to the bar down the street, you’re going to encounter these ideas.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. And so folks, we’ve got to, and this is me speaking personally, we’ve got to look at what is best for our students. Many folks think, well, because I’m well educated, I know better than somebody else does. No, your experiences are just different than somebody else.

Sean Stevens: You have different experiences. Exactly.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. And until you’ve walked, I, and I can remember my parents saying this years ago, until you’ve walked a mile in somebody else’s shoes, you don’t know their perspectives, and we’ve forgotten that.

We need to be able to teach both sides of a story and let people come to their own conclusions of what their values most align with.

We haven’t done that.

Sean Stevens: I wouldn’t say we’ve stopped entirely, but largely seem to have stopped doing that. I would say all sides even because I wouldn’t want a binary—

Oh, absolutely.

—the story, right? Like I would say all sides. It just, you’re doing a disservice when you don’t, even if the idea is wrong, you should still be exposed to it.

It’s because you need to know that argument’s out there. And you need to know why it’s wrong. One of the best pieces of advice I got from my PhD advisor, Lee Jossum is if you disagree with an academic theory and you want to criticize it, you better be able to write as if you actually believe that theory, which means you need to understand it.

Drumm McNaughton: Exactly.

Sean Stevens: Right?

Drumm McNaughton: And the whole point of a dissertation or academic writing. You’ve got to be able to look at both sides of a situation, an issue, whatever you call it, and be able to justify through research, through previous literature. And one of the things I used to say is with a PhD, you ought to be able to argue either side of the coin.

Sean Stevens: Yes, you should be able to argue whatever it is. And be convincing. Even if you don’t believe the side you’re arguing, you still should be able to be convincing in that argument.

Drumm McNaughton: I, I can remember going through my program and I, I was very fortunate to go to a really good school, it’s now Fielding Graduate University, back then it was the Fielding Institute. And they had professors, the creme of the creme, from all over the country who would quote adjuncts or part-time faculty there and had tenured positions at New York University or University of Michigan, Colorado, et cetera, and observing these folks arguing a point, and I’m going, and it wasn’t arguing in the, it was arguing in the academic sense—

Sean Stevens: Yes. Not like we’re about to fight, it’s like a spirited exchange.

Drumm McNaughton: A spirited discussion, exactly. And it was like, do I want to do this? Until I finally got in and understood the culture a little better, and it’s like, they’re just trying to make their point based on the literature. It wasn’t that they didn’t like each other.

And this

is

Sean Stevens: They just have different thoughts. They just have different takes, different thoughts.

Drumm McNaughton: And this is something I think we have failed in many respects to teach students, younger students is it’s perfectly fine to have disagreements. It doesn’t mean that I don’t like you or respect you or anything else. It’s a different perspective. And teach them not so much in a debate of win lose, as it is, make your point in a civil way and be able to walk away and say, you’re still my friend.

Sean Stevens: Yes, and back it up. Try to be as sophisticated as you can use evidence, don’t just—

Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.

Sean Stevens: —throw bombs like people like to do on, on, on social media. Again, to go back to like a little bit about what we were talking about before, like that medium doesn’t lend itself well to like a long form academic argumentation, right? You’re going to, you’re going to take about 20 tweets and expect people to read all of those. They react to one and they’re off and running. We put out, I, I see it all the time whenever we put out survey data and it’s like whether it’s a positive reaction or negative reaction, there’s no way you read the entire report in like the three minutes it’s been out for you to have this reaction, like you haven’t even read it.

Wait, so how are you having a reaction to it?

Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.

Sean Stevens: It’s a 60 page report. There’s no way you read it in three minutes. I’m sorry.

Drumm McNaughton: And AI, I think is making things more challenging in that same respect because, AI give me the summary of this 60 page research report and it spits out something in 15 seconds. And you read that and you think you understand the nuances behind it or the details.

I, I’ll give you a great example. We were talking with a client just recently and they were thinking, oh we don’t have to go through this particular licensure because we don’t have any revenue. And we took a look at it and it’s like, no, that was a very specific Google said, Yes, you’re fine.

The problem was, is it was one nuance that they missed. So they needed to go through this licensure because they weren’t a aviation training institution. By just relying on AI and not understanding the nuances, you miss a good piece of what should be part of your information and the basis for your conversation for your discussion.

Sean Stevens: And what’s interesting to hear all that is effectively what I’ve found in using the AI tools, that it’s how you prompt it.

Exactly.

And so if you are good at prompting it, you’re going to get very good results. But when you literally are just like, hey, just summarize this report for me, it’s going to spit out what it spits out.

But if you give it more specific things, it will give you a good summary. And like, this gets us a little off topic and we don’t have to go down this road, but I see it as this thing where I think that there’s… we’re at this very interesting point where people who figure out how to, people who are already productive, very productive in their field, who figure out how to prompt AI well, are just going to become more productive and the rest of the people are going to be left behind.

And that’s troubling in a lot of ways.

Drumm McNaughton: It is. And we have strayed a little bit off topic. Let’s bring it back in again.

Sean Stevens: But this also has relevance, AI has relevance to higher ed, so we can maybe get it

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. Yes. A little literary license. What the heck?

[00:28:14] Institutional Neutrality: Commenting Without Taking Sides

Drumm McNaughton: So given what’s going on, we’ve been talking about a little bit about what presidents should be doing, what about this institutional neutrality? What are your thoughts around that?

Sean Stevens: So at FIRE we think it is a good thing for schools to adopt that stance. I don’t see that as meaning you cannot comment at all on the events of the day. It just simply means you, you don’t indicate the taking of a political side because you have students, faculty, staff, other administrators even on campus who have different political views, right?

And so when you take a side, you send a message to the people who aren’t on that side that it’s hey, maybe you should stay quiet a little bit. Sometimes, your views aren’t welcome. But this also does not mean that you cannot comment on the events of the day. I think it might be. I don’t recall, I, maybe I did this when we talked the last time or not, but a really good example of this I think is the incoming Barnard president. And they’re like the bottom of our free speech rankings, basically, like them in Columbia and Indiana are there. When they came in, I don’t remember exactly. I think it was Charlie Kirk. It was the Charlie Kirk issue. The comment they made about it was very, it was neutral, but it was like, it still addressed the issue. It was effectively, we’re not going to comment on whether he’s he’s a good or bad person. They were just like, look, this is a moment where we need to take stock and understand why freedom of speech, academic freedom, why these things are important to a campus community. Emphasizing that as like what we need to take out of this. So it’s like you’re still commenting on the event and you’re still saying, Hey didn’t want this to happen. Think this is a horrible thing, but it’s not saying, Hey I like Charlie Kirk, or I hate him, or whatever.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes.

You’re not crossing the line. What you’re doing is… the event was horrible. I don’t agree. You can say that. I personally don’t agree with his comments and the way he did things, but whoever did this, crossed the line.

Sean Stevens: This is a husband and a father who got shot in front of his wife and kids.

Drumm McNaughton: Exactly. Yes. And there’s got to be a red line. And whether that, and we could get in and debate this for hours with respect to free speech, et cetera. There is free speech. Where does it cross the line to hate speech or threatening speech. That’s a whole different conversation.

But there’s also the maturity aspect and the moral aspect of what is right to be able to be said. If you were shot and your spouse was there, would you want your spouse to hear what was just said? Absolutely not. It comes back to walking in somebody else’s shoes.

Sean Stevens: Yes, this actually came up, I was recently at the University of Michigan to give a talk on free speech, academic freedom and the state of affairs on UMich’s campus, and the professor who was on the panel with me effectively brought this up. He’s like, hey, your speech is protected. Most of it probably is. There’s very few things that aren’t, but, what is it contributing. Is it worth it to say that right now, maybe? Do you need to go there right now into this audience versus like, what we alluded to before? Maybe your thoughts about how awful Charlie Kirk was and he deserved it, should have been said to your friends in private who aren’t going to stab you in the back and try to get you fired.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. Or maybe they shouldn’t be said at all.

Sean Stevens: Or maybe you just say them out loud privately to yourself. Like, say it to dog, say it to your dog.

Drumm McNaughton: Or maybe you take it a step further and just say, you don’t even think it, it’s not appropriate.

Sean Stevens: Yes, you could have the thought and then just be like, you know what? That’s probably not appropriate. Let’s move

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, Exactly.

Sean Stevens: Yes.

Drumm McNaughton: One of the folks that I studied for years, one of the things that he said was, learn to behave. And I think what a lot of this is learning to behave.

Sean Stevens: Yes, on, on both sides too, like on both sides of this issue, right? Like there’s learning to behave in terms of, sometimes you just don’t need to say that,

Drumm McNaughton: Yes.

Mm-hmm.

And

Sean Stevens: the other side is, you know what? Sometimes you could just ignore it.

Drumm McNaughton: Exactly.

[00:33:02] Three Takeaways for Presidents and Boards Around Free Speech

Drumm McNaughton: Well, as always, we have an incredible conversation and I so much appreciate the work that you’re doing, and that FIRE is doing.

Three takeaways for our presidents and boards around free speech.

Sean Stevens: Yes, so one, you need to defend your students and faculty’s expressive rights. It might be hard sometimes, and I know you’re under a lot of pressure right now from outside sources now as well as some internal pressures, but you need to stay strong and leadership really matters. I’ll build on that and mention too, a few specific schools where I think leadership has made a difference.

Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, University of South Carolina, all of these schools when new leadership came in, well, maybe not, Vanderbilt wasn’t new leadership, the other two was new leadership came in, but all three of these schools they’ve worked very closely with us to work on their speech policies, to reform them.

They’ve wed on the issue, President Blaylock from Dartmouth said last summer at the Heterodox Academy conference in response to another college president, who, his line is basically, it’s never the time to criticize colleges and universities for their speech problems. It’s never the time.

And she was like, no, it is. We can combat and we can object to what the Trump administration is doing. But we can also acknowledge that we had something to do with bringing this on. Like effectively, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We could do both of these things and you need to do those things.

And then it’s the third one is, hey, we’re here for you. FIRE is here for you. We’re trying to help you in a lot of ways, and we’re trying to oppose these actions. So please work with us. I know some of you might be skeptical about us and our motives and whatever, but no, we care and we want to work with you. And we think what’s going on right now is awful.

Yes.

And we want to work with you and please work with us.

Thank you sir. Good takeaways. What’s next for you? What’s next for FIRE?

[00:35:24] National Speech Index

So, we just put out, we didn’t really talk about this because it’s not so relevant to college and university campuses, but, every three months we do a poll in collaboration with the Polarization Research Lab at Dartmouth. We call it the National Speech Index. We got a core set of questions that we ask every run, and then based on current events, we put new ones in.

So we just released a round of that this week from January. Next round will come out in April. Our college free speech rankings surveys in the field. For this year, we’ll be getting that data back at the end of May and those will come out in September. And then maybe we could chat about those down the road.

Drumm McNaughton: Sounds like a great plan.

Sean Stevens: All right.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, my friend, it’s been good having you back on the show As always, I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, Sean. And I look forward to the next time.

Sean Stevens: Yes, always good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Drumm McNaughton: My pleasure.

Thanks for listening this week and a special thank you to my guest, Dr. Sean Stevens from the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression.

Sean, it was a pleasure having you on the show. I look forward to the next time we get a chance to exchange ideas. To my listeners, thanks again for tuning in. See you next week.