Campuses for All: How Free Speech Education Can Protect and Enrich Colleges and Universities

The challenges that campuses face when it comes to free speech and inclusion are part of a larger debate in the United States over the role of diversity, equity, and inclusion in education. Since 2021, Republican state lawmakers have introduced an avalanche of "educational gag orders"--legislation to ban a vague set of so-called divisive concepts related to race, gender, sex, and sexuality. In the face of educational gag orders and pressures to create more inclusive higher education environments, campuses can take proactive steps to educate their communities about free speech and First Amendment principles. Higher education institutions' goal should be to strengthen fluency with free speech and academic freedom principles among students, faculty, and staff, and to use free expression principles to inform judgments and decision-making processes, even in fast-evolving campus environments.