It’s a trend that reveals attitudes about hearing opposing perspectives in younger cohorts. It’s an early signal for what future politics may look like.
However, recent polls regarding support for free speech make me think it’s not an anomaly. Pew has some troubling data here especially regarding support for violence against speakers.
I’m glad someone is tracking it now, regardless.
"This original database only recorded attempts to disinvite speakers from speaking at campus events. FIRE announced the expanded Campus Deplatforming database on February 8, 2024, and detailed how the expanded database now includes records of attempts to cancel performances (e.g., comedy shows, plays), art exhibits, or film screenings, in addition to speaker disinvitation attempts"
How much of the recent change is due to that expanded coverage?
I tried to download the data, but got a "Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: a.has is not a function" in Firefox. I can see though that the first few entries include a staged reading of a play, an artistic work on display, and Night of Drag fundraiser, so I know it's showing the expanded coverage.
I also can't figure out how to search the data. How many times is Kissinger in the database?
Does it include, for example, https://nyunews.com/2018/10/16/10-17-news-kissinger/ from 2018? ("Once it was made public that he would be a guest at the Stern speaker series, “In Conversation with Lord Mervyn King,” over a dozen student groups organized a protest against him titled “No War Criminals at NYU” and wrote a letter calling on the university to cancel the event.")
I have a really tough time with any "database" which offers downloading and search, but where both are broken (at least for me), making spot-checking very difficult.
Before social media, these sorts of things would be reported in the school and perhaps also local newspapers. We know this because we've read about the anti-war protests in the 1960s and 1970s. I know this, because I went to college ca. 1990 and these happened.
But gathering this data would require expensive and slow scholarly effort.
Are you sure it was Pew? https://nypost.com/2026/09/21/us-news/record-number-of-us-co... says it was a FIRE, and I gotta say I'm not impressed with them so far.
Going back to your suggestion that this may be an "early signal for what future politics may look like." I remind you that we used to have firebombings at colleges (examples, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_Hall_bombing , https://www.nytimes.com/1969/11/12/archives/firebomb-set-off... and https://las.illinois.edu/news/2021-07-13/fire-protest-braver...), as part of the protests against Vietnam. How well did those protests predict the future?
Also a great question about Kissinger.
> Before social media, these sorts of things would be reported in the school and perhaps also local newspapers.
Actual disinvitations, yes, but I imagine that it would have been harder to find examples of unsuccessful pressure. Not everything makes into the paper, depending on who the editor is, and an unsuccessful pressure campaign may not be considered a real story. I don’t see how that past data could even be collected now in a convincing way.
> Are you sure it was Pew?
I think you’re right, I have also read the FIRE article and I may have confused it with an earlier poll from Pew about political violence, along with a more recent one about free speech and the media. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/23/americans... https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2026/09/15/americans-...
With regards to past violence, I would say that the early instances were indicative of the later trend. But obviously not every trend continues forever (most don’t). I don’t think it’s something to panic over, but it shouldn’t be ignored.
I read the methodology and wasn't convinced that the collection isn't biased by the marketing push for awareness of FIRE's mission, or by changing methods in data collection.
Their graphs, for example, don't even show error bars, which makes it impossible to determine if the trend they report is meaningful or random noise.
Regarding old campus newspapers, part of the "expensive and slow scholarly effort" means also reading the followup papers to see if there is information about a meeting being held or canceled, and if there isn't, include that in the statistics collection.
I suspect that the data collection will improve from this point forward if they commit to this series. As I said, I don’t really think that it’s feasible to get convincing data on this particular issue from the past, even if you mine the newspapers and whatever fossilized meeting schedules can be extracted from the archives. You could craft a narrative around whatever you find, but I don’t think I’d put much stock in it, whichever way it goes.
As I said earlier, I’m just happy someone is collecting this data now moving forward. I think it’s an important indicator, and definitely something to watch in the future.
"If they commit to this series"? You know their data starts in 1998. How long until you think they are committed?
If there are no error estimates, how can you even tell if it's an important indicator upward or downwards?
Ok, so database search does seem to work for me at least. I found a 2020 Kissinger cancellation but not the 2018 one. I am curious about its absence. There was only one NYU issue recorded that year. Looks like you might have found a missing data point.
Anyway, if they stick with the current methodology until 2030, I’ll say that’s a solid start. That’s 15 years since 2015, which is a reasonable arbitrary year past which the effects of modern social media would be in play. Trends should be very clear at that point, and data collection methods shouldn’t be too different from the start of that period.
As for why I respect their reporting, I read some about their methodology in the past, when I first started following them, and I also have read criticism of them, which I did not find compelling. I don’t generally dig into every little detail of it because I have trusted sources who trust them, and that’s how you generally find your way in a world with too much data and too little time. Regardless, although they are imperfect (that missing data point!), they seem to be mostly thorough, and reading through the methodology PDF it looks like a good overall approach.
That, combined with the lack of error bars (with estimates for possible increased signal sensitivity in their collection method), and the fact they changed methodology while their reports imply an unchanged methodology, does not lead me to the same conclusion you've reached.
MLK Jr. remarked that "a riot is the language of the unheard", not to justify the violent actions against American white supremacy, but to describe the underlying motivations which encourage those riots,
Those who have no political power are more likely to use physical power to cause change. If non-violent protest does not work, then violent protest is more likely.
As a thought experiment, consider the possibility that in the 1990s the administration was more responsive to student protests, and more amicable to cancelling, for example, a scheduled talk by a proponent of pseudoscience.
While three decades later, the administration practices have changed[1], student views are increasingly ignored, and students found their school was increasingly used to give pseudoscience the veneer of respectability.
If non-violent responses don't work, do you sit there and bear it? Do you leave? Or do you get tempted by violence to "make things right" for the shared esprit de corp among the students?
Quoting MLK Jr more fully:
> A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
Fight against social justice, expect thoughts to bend towards violence.
[1] https://telescoper.blog/2026/10/18/dark-academia-how-univers...
> "Dark Academia – How Universities Die" is] an analysis of the decline of the neoliberal model of the university accompanied by the rise of commercialisation, managerialism and authoritarian models of governance. ...
> '''Impersonal and unforgiving management hierarchies have supplanted academic judgement, collegiality and professional common sense. in many institutions, senior executives have no PhDs and have been trained in business or the military instead. Mindless performance targets dominate teaching and research to the point of caricature, designed by functionaries who’ve never taught a class or written a research article in their lives. Unfortunately, these hierarchies have become notoriously bossy. Coercion rather than volition compels much academic labour today, even tasks that scholars would have otherwise done willingly because it’s central to their vocation. This surfeit of duress, most of which is unnecessary and counterproductive, is a defining feature of the corporate university.'''
> The book charts the rise of this fanatical managerialism, the consequent fall of academic institutions as places of education, scholarship and research, and their replacement by soulless teaching factories.
There can be multiple distinct problems and a variety of resulting downstream effects at one time. I don’t think you’ve correctly identified the root cause here, either. It’s several levels up.
> As a thought experiment, consider the possibility that in the 1990s the administration was more responsive to student protests, and more amicable to cancelling, for example, a scheduled talk by a proponent of pseudoscience.
I seriously doubt that students in the 1990s, the era of the X-Files and Art Bell, were out protesting “pseudoscience”. This was a time when conspiracies were counterculture and cool, although few (at least few that I knew) really took them seriously or saw them as a threat. Rather than protest, the few students who were even aware of it were probably most likely to smoke a bowl and giggle through a speaker like this, as an exercise in irony.
As for the rest of your text, I don’t accept that we’re at the point of violent struggle, especially on campus. You could argue for it elsewhere, maybe, but it’s laughable that the modern campus could be a valid site for this, except for maybe the ones that have faced violent suppression of speech by authorities. This is especially when the protest actions are themselves targeted towards suppressing speech, and not towards the tangible infrastructure of oppression.
Why don’t the students seem to go after any datacenters, or departments doing research for ICE, instead of going after Twitter shitposters? It almost seems like they are walking into a trap designed to paint them (justly in this case) as unreasonable, violent, and against shared freedoms. They are being dogwalked into losing their own freedoms, and you’re here supporting the dogwalkers.
> I seriously doubt that students in the 1990s, the era of the X-Files and Art Bell, were out protesting “pseudoscience”.
Interesting. On what do you base your doubt?
I drew my specific example from being a student in the 1990s, and remembering the protests against the racist psuedoscience of "The Bell Curve". For example, from
https://archive.org/details/bellcurvedebateh00jaco/page/170/...
"""Rushton describes student protests against him: "They have a large number of blacks parading the halls with bullhorns, shouting, banging on the walls. If four or five skinheads with swastika armbands showed up outside my class, there would be tanks on campus to get them off and into jail. If you've got, quote, disadvantaged groups, a band of blacks and left wingers, the university will cave in."""
Here's a bio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Philippe_Rushton
Now, that's in Canada, but similar things happened in US universities. Do I need to find specific examples or will you trust me on that?
> Why don’t the students seem to go after any datacenters
Ahh, you mean the "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" approach?
Quite simple - polls are warning signs, and data center owners, like pipeline owners, have a lot of money and security, and with the government backing them up.
The civil rights movement started decades before MLK Jr.
Even though it’s still pseudoscience, I mentally have “racist pseudoscience” in its own unique category, because it feels distinct.
Regardless, I think the nature of older protests was often different. Rather than attempting to prevent the speaker from speaking, in my experience protests were most often either counterspeech or silent objection. I did some quick research that seems to bear this out. The largest protest against him, at Harvard, was a counterspeech rally. A later Harvard protest involved a silent walkout. An MIT protest involved flyering.
Now you could say that these protests were an implicit attempt to disinvite the speaker. For instance, the flyers apparently “claimed that MIT was insulting all minorities by inviting Murray to speak” [0]. But there’s no record that I can find of organized attempts to stop him from speaking. IMHO that’s the big difference versus today, and that’s what I am opposed to. Protest through counterspeech is a great thing. Silent protest also makes a great statement. Physically blocking, threatening, or attacking speakers is never ok.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20211203153624/http://tech.mit.e...
Anyway, if the students get violent on campus, the campus gets violent in response, and everyone loses some liberties in the process. Campus may be a “soft target” for now, but this kind of escalation is one reason that they too are becoming like prisons.
The issue isn't "if the students get violent on campus, the campus gets violent in response", it's that recent history shows that even if students stay non-violent, the campus still gets violent in response, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper_spray_incident .
It is hard to stay non-violent when the power structure opposed to you becomes increasingly violent.
FWIW, I recall student protests during the 1990s to deplatform Henry Kissinger due to his war crimes and abuses against humanity. There were student anti-war protestors in the 1990s too - I seem to recall Stanford students were opposed to her becoming provost. I'm also sure that if I looked I could find students opposed to a visit by Kurt Waldheim, due to his association with the Nazi Party.
Regarding your examples, the UC Davis thing was an outlier from over a decade ago, during the slow shift in institutional power as we moved away from the Bush era. The Chancellor was dismissed and replaced a few years later. I find it hard to connect that to anything current, in the same way that Kent State isn’t particularly relevant, or UW student involvement in the Battle for Seattle.
Being opposed to someone becoming provost is not the same as blocking them from speaking. I’d be interested to see if you can dig up something on actual deplatforming attempts versus protests for the other instances you gave. Again, peaceful protest is always acceptable.
Anyways, it sounds like you’ve had very different experiences than me, and maybe some different foundational beliefs. It’s hard to square the two.
And according to the methodology, calling for someone's resignation at a university is not considered deplatforming, while calling for an art piece to be taken down ... is.
Which I think is a bizarre definition.
I'm a programmer. What you're asking for is far from my expertise. My observation is this FIRE study does not appear sufficient strong to support the conclusions you want to draw from it. I am not able to present evidence which might convince you that your conclusions are right or wrong.
And it is far easier for you to criticize any specific examples I come up with, than for me to do the research you want me to present, which seems rather unfair, given that your only supporting evidence is this FIRE report.