The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression released a report Wednesday night examining efforts to discipline student speech at universities across the country, including Northwestern, between 2020 and 2024.
This “Students Under Fire” report identified 1,014 students and student groups who were targeted or punished for their speech nationwide. The report identified 409 incidents of individuals being targeted and 605 incidents of student groups being targeted.
From 2020 to 2024, NU had zero incidents targeting individual students and 11 targeting student groups, according to FIRE’s report. Of these 11 incidents, there were seven occurrences when student groups were punished and four when action was demanded but no punishment was enforced.
Of those punished, five groups at NU — Interfraternity Council, Fossil Free NU, Jewish Voice for Peace at NU, NU Students for Justice in Palestine and Students Organizing for Labor Rights — were punished by administrators, according to the data. On the other two occasions, student media groups, collectively, and NU College Republicans were punished by NU’s Associated Student Government, the data stated.
The four non-punitive incidents include demands for punishment by an advocacy group against the Middle Eastern North African Student Association and demands for punishment by students against Young Americans for Freedom. There were two additional demands for punishment against SJP — once by activists and once by alumni, the general public and stakeholders.
Calls for punishment originated primarily from other students from 2020 to 2022, and from administrators since 2023, according to the report. The past two years have also seen more attempts led by government officials and politicians than in any other years, the report said. In 2023, Students for Justice in Palestine became the most targeted student group nationally.
The report notes that these “student speech controversies” were logged in the Students Under Fire database under two dominant topics: race, which dominated from 2020 to 2022, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which dominated from 2023 to the present. The report attributes these themes as responses to cultural events: the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in May 2020 and the Israel-Hamas war beginning in October 2023.
The report adds that every day for the first four months of 2025, there has been a new incident entered in the Student Under Fire database from universities nationwide. The number of entries to the database this year is on pace to double last year’s total.
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