In the upheaval that followed the Gaza protests on college campuses and the Trump administration’s subsequent attacks on universities, school administrators confronted a thorny challenge: how to get students and professors to speak freely when they have reason to fear the consequences?
Two Boston-area universities have produced strikingly different responses.
Harvard University undertook a multi-year experiment in remaking campus speech norms with top-down reforms, resulting in what students and professors describe as a kind of thaw on a campus where tensions over politics, ideology, and speech had thrust it into an acrimonious national debate.
Conversely, some students and professors at Northeastern University complain their administrators have taken the opposite approach, to the detriment of the free speech climate on campus. As one professor put it, “a vacuum of leadership” has led to a “chilling effect” on campus, with students and staff afraid the administration won’t support them if they say something controversial.
These disparate scenarios, based on interviews with faculty and students on both campuses, are also born out in new rankings by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a national legal group that assesses colleges based on the climate for speech on campus. Harvard, once dead last in FIRE’s eyes, shot up in its new rankings, while Northeastern has tumbled to nearly the bottom in the past two years.
By its stature alone, Harvard would be in the national spotlight, particularly after the student protests over the Israel-Hamas war swept through college campuses. But its efforts to improve the climate for speech predates the second Trump administration’s bitter fights against schools it deems intolerant to all but leftist ideology.
Harvard leaders have told students to stiffen their spines and expect to encounter viewpoints that discomfort or even offend them. They have nudged teaching fellows and professors to keep their personal politics out of the classroom. And they have sought to foster campus events that help students bridge ideological and cultural divides.
The result, according to interviews with members of the campus community, is significantly less tension and fear over speech controversies as students regained the muscle memory to engage in difficult discussions and debate.
Once fiercely critical of Harvard, the FIRE group says this is not just happy talk. After ranking last in the two previous years, Harvard leapt into a respectable 71st out of 261 schools in the new results released just last week.
Notably, Harvard’s leap in the rankings was largely the result of FIRE’s student surveys, the group’s chief researcher said, and not because Harvard gamed the scoring rubric with toothless policy changes. Sean Stevens, who oversaw the study, said the biggest change was that Harvard students expressed far more confidence than in past years that the university’s leaders would defend their speech rights.
Meanwhile, some students and professors at Northeastern University allege their school’s leaders have taken a hands-off approach to speech issues since cracking down on a pro-Palestinian protest encampment more than two years ago.
It is a curious charge: Generally speech advocates want administrators to stay out of the way. But the argument today — at Harvard and Northeastern — is that to restore open discourse and vigorous debate university leaders must actually lead the way.
“I would say that maybe the administration hasn’t outright caused the issue, but they have also exacerbated the issue by not listening to any of the solutions,” said Valentina Moghaddam, whose student group, Educational Freedom Project, has pushed Northeastern to adopt speech protections.
The NU faculty member who spoke of a chilling effect said students of all political stripes still seem hesitant to speak out.
“It turns into either one group feels supported and the other doesn’t … or it turns into silence,” the faculty member said, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear for her position as a non-tenure track professor.
In FIRE’s rankings, Northeastern dropped to nearly the bottom during the past two years. In its surveys, students said they do not feel comfortable disagreeing with professors or expressing controversial views on campus. In a separate survey analyzed by the faculty senate’s academic freedom committee, 61 percent of faculty members said they were not confident that Northeastern’s leaders would protect a speaker’s right to express controversial views.
Michael Armini, a Northeastern spokesperson, said these critiques are baseless and that the school’s commitment to academic freedom is steadfast.
“Not a week goes by that we don’t hear about some outside pressure group making up a report card or ranking,” he said.
He pointed to numerous university policies protecting free expression, including this line in the student code of conduct: “It is recognized that all members of an academic community, individually and collectively, have a right to express their views publicly on any issue.”
Moreover, in a recent interview with the school paper, Northeastern University’s president, Joseph Aoun, emphatically endorsed an open climate where campus members can express and debate difficult opinions.
FIRE itself has faced its share of criticism for its methodology ranking campus speech, that its scoring system can be subjective and its dinging of schools can feel arbitrary.
“I don’t know if it’s even directionally right,” Eitan Hersh, a Tufts University political scientist who generally supports FIRE’s advocacy, said of the college rankings.
At Harvard, recent graduate Ari Kohn said when she arrived as a freshman in 2021, she expected an intellectually diverse and stimulating environment, but instead found classmates afraid to disagree and an unofficial blacklisting system.
“People would talk about them and say, ‘Oh, I hear this person is weird,’ or ‘conservative,’ or just unaware of the prevailing views,” Kohn said. “And then they wouldn’t be invited” to parties or into clubs.
Such informal speech surveillance, she said, took on outsized proportion given what preoccupies students: their careers. Far more Harvard students are worried about landing a job in finance, consulting, or some other profession than policing their classmates’ speech. But if getting into the consulting club was important, then steering clear of controversy was the prudent move.
Discouraged, Kohn took a gap year and spent the summer in a program run by the conservative American Enterprise Institute that brought together students from across the ideological spectrum. She found herself having dinners with a Catholic integralist and a political Marxist.
“I didn’t know real people could have these views,” Kohn, who describes herself as left of center, said. “I had the summer of my life.” But she had to leave Harvard to get it.
Today, Kohn, now is a research fellow at Harvard, said the climate has shifted. “It’s hard to evaluate the counter-factual, but I can confidently say that Harvard has many more student spaces that have the intellectual diversity and rigor that I found at AEI and longed for in my first year,” she said.
Edward Hall, a philosophy professor involved in the push for greater intellectual openness, said classroom debate withered during the 2010s. He attributed much of this to social media. Students, he said, were afraid to put a foot wrong during a classroom debate lest they be shamed on social media.
Harvard leaders have tried to address these concerns and, by some measures at least, have made progress.
They have pushed for rules for campus events and classrooms requiring participants to promise not to disclose after the fact who said what. That gives students confidence to argue unpopular views, perhaps ones they don’t even hold, without fear of repercussions, Harvard professors said.
Freshmen are now reminded during orientation to expect vigorous debate. Harvard has trained teaching fellows to manage contentious classroom discussions, funded student-led events meant to bridge ideological and cultural divides, and is now recruiting professors representing viewpoints that are scarce at Harvard.
Some of these stem from a report on “open inquiry and constructive dialogue” commissioned by Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, in 2024, one of Harvard’s responses to controversies following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
Among those policies were rules governing student protests that remain on the books and that some consider affronts to speech rights. But FIRE supports many of Garber’s other measures.
In its most recent rankings, it favorably cited Harvard’s policy of institutional neutrality, which discourages university leaders from taking public positions on contentious issues, among others for contributing to a more open environment.
Stevens, FIRE’s chief researcher, credits Garber with changing Harvard’s posture. “I think since he’s taken over the leadership, the stance and the climate, the way they’ve approached free speech has shifted in a positive direction,” he said.
He said the sentiment reflected in its surveys could be the result of students seeing the university’s leaders standing up for academic independence while facing President Trump last year.
The picture that emerged from Northeastern was almost the opposite. Students told FIRE they did not feel the administration would back them in a speech controversy and many expressed discomfort expressing controversial ideas. FIRE also docked the university for not adopting certain speech protections the group favors. The faculty senate and the student government have also called on Northeastern to adopt the Chicago Principles, guidelines aimed at protecting the expression of controversial views on campus.
Notably, Harvard has also declined to adopt those principles.
Moghaddam, the student group leader, said she bumped into NU president Auon last week after a campus festival.
“What’s the plan from the administration to actually follow through and implement changes the faculty and students clearly want?” she recalled asking him.
“His response was that, ‘You have to live it. You have to live free speech, speak your mind.’” Moghaddam recalled. “He said that he hoped students feel like we can speak freely on campus but the reality is, and the data has shown, that’s not the case.”
It’s a curious moment: a campus activist asking for an administrator to get more involved with campus speech. But it echoes a complaint that NU leaders operate at too far a remove.
After Northeastern students raised concerns about transparency in the university’s governance and protections for speech and peaceful demonstration, the Boston City Council convened a hearing in March. There, Northeastern students called on the administration to spell out what it would do if ICE came to campus, a nod to speech issues because foreign students are hesitant to express their views for fear of reprisal from the Trump administration.
Back then, they also complained that the student newspaper had been unable to interview Aoun for several years despite multiple requests. Aoun has since granted the paper an interview in which he said he favors vigorous campus debate.
“I can diverge from you. You can diverge from me. But we can sit down and talk, without vilifying each other,” he said.
Mike Damiano can be reached at mike.damiano@globe.com.