What College Students Really Think About Cancel Culture

Every couple of months it seems the news features another college-campus free-speech incident. In 2021, for instance, a University of Rochester professor was suspended after quoting texts that contained a racial slur; MIT canceled a lecture by a speaker who’d criticized diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; and a handful of students across the country felt they were kept out of campus leadership positions due to their conservative beliefs.

Because of events like these, many political commentators write about the threat to academic freedom with an end-of-times urgency. State legislators have introduced roughly 81 bills since 2019 aimed at protecting free speech on campuses, according to Joe Cohn, the legislative and policy director at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). And last June, two House Republicans launched a committee called the Campus Free Speech Caucus based on the claim that “the First Amendment is under attack on campuses across the country” and that “every day, students and faculty are forced to self-censor out of fear that they will be ‘canceled’ by the mob.”