Yale Is Abandoning Its Own Free Speech Codes

In theory, Yale University provides an open forum for free speech. In theory, as one of the world’s premier academic institutions, Yale encourages discussion and debate on campus. In theory, Yale students can openly explore new ideas and challenge orthodoxies on their way to becoming tomorrow’s leaders.

In reality, three-fifths of college students nationwide report being intimidated by their professors or classmates against sharing their opinions in class, according to the most recent data from the Buckley Program, an organization dedicated to intellectual diversity and free speech at Yale. Of about one hundred Buckley Program student fellows surveyed this summer, none said that Yale always lived up to its free-speech principles.

And Yale does have free-speech principles. To ensure that the student body is aware of them, the Buckley Program has distributed copies of the 1974 Woodward Report, which lays out Yale’s commitment to free speech, to every incoming freshman.

Those watching recent events at Yale might be surprised to hear that the university has made any commitment to free speech. Earlier this year, protesters with no apparent sense of irony shouted down a panel on free speech at Yale Law School. In October of last year, Yale Law School administrators pressured a Native American student to apologize for using the term “trap house” in a party invitation. In January 2021, a group of psychiatry residents complained to the chair of the department that a lecture was “traumatizing” because the speaker had joked about being surprised to find an artisanal coffee shop in rural Ohio. 

Yale has continued to plummet in free-speech rankings. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) recently ranked Yale 198th out of 203 schools for free speech. Yale was ranked 106th for student comfort in expressing ideas among peers and professors on campus; 150th for administrative support for free speech; and 184th for student acceptance of shouting down or even violently preventing speech with which they disagree (a high ranking on this measure would indicate student opposition to such behavior).

The Yale of today seems to inch further and further from the free-speech principles it adopted in 1974. Yale was spurred to do so after it had disinvited some speakers and seen student shout-downs of others. In response, then-Yale president Kingman Brewster convened a committee to review those incidents and the campus free-speech environment.

The committee published the Woodward Report, outlining the challenges to free speech at Yale and suggesting appropriate responses. The report called on Yale to recognize the “right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.” Woodward, who wrote a book praised by Martin Luther King, Jr. as “the historical Bible of the civil rights movement,” noted in the committee’s report that curtailing “free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom,” depriving both potential speakers and potential listeners.

In sum, the committee wrote, “every member of the university has an obligation to permit free expression in the university.” The Yale Corporation, Yale’s governing body, passed policies supporting a free-speech environment even for controversial speakers.

Yale has not stood by these principles, however. In response to a wrongful-termination lawsuit focused on academic freedom, Yale’s lawyers have argued that the “Woodward Report is a statement of principles,  not a set of contractual promises.” Yale’s lawyers further maintained that the faculty handbook was Yale’s real free-speech guiding document. 

With Yale’s commitment to its guiding principles seeming to weaken, we felt it important to equip new students with a book entitled Campus Speech in Crisis: What the Yale Experience Can Teach America. Each copy of the book includes a copy of the Woodward Report, commentary by Judge José Cabranes and Yale Law School Professor Kate Stith, and a copy of the Chicago Principles, the University of Chicago’s laudable free-speech guidelines. (Chicago placed first in FIRE’s recent free-speech rankings.)

Yale seems to be joining in with cancel culture rather than resisting its oppressive orthodoxies. If students are to rebuild the culture of free speech and open debate at the university, they will need all the tools at their disposal to do so. We hope that the incoming freshman class, armed with copies of the free-speech principles that have guided Yale for almost 50 years, can help turn the tide.