In the fight to define the limits of freedom of expression, college campuses have long found themselves at the front lines.
That battle continues today. Amid an ever-escalating culture war and deepening political polarization, private and public schools have struggled to accommodate competing interests between those who prioritize open debate and those worried about the potential harm caused by the spread of certain ideas, particularly to marginalized groups.
Brigham Young University is no exception.
So shows a new study by the think tank Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and public opinion researcher College Pulse. Based on interviews with more than 50,000 undergraduate students nationwide (and nearly 500 at BYU), the authors investigated when (if ever) respondents felt discouraged from expressing an opinion on campus — as well as their own tolerance for views that oppose theirs. Based on their answers, the researchers assigned each school a score on a scale from 0 to 100.
All told, the Provo school, owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, garnered 26.27 points, placing the faith’s flagship campus near the bottom of the 250-plus private and public schools surveyed.
Faith and free inquiry
Or, it would have, if researchers hadn’t opted to put BYU, along with a handful of other private religious universities, in its own separate “Warning” category. This group, which included the likes of Liberty University, founded by the late televangelist Jerry Falwell, and Baptist-leaning Baylor University, was reserved for institutions whose policies, the authors wrote, “clearly and consistently state that [they prioritize] other values over a commitment to freedom of speech.”
That this group was entirely populated by religious schools (although, notably, not all of those studied) speaks to an inherent friction many faith-based colleges face — a traditional role of higher education to challenge assumptions and broaden horizons vs. a targeted mission to promote belief in a particular set of teachings.
It’s a tension very much alive in BYU’s academic freedom policy, a 3,800-word document that pairs expansive definitions of truth (“the gospel encompasses all truth and affirms the full range of human modes of knowing”) with an emphasis on the need to check findings against “continuing revelation” and the scriptures.
Current administrators have recently focused on the latter, evidenced in a 2023 directive to department chairs and deans to revise their criteria for promotion to better reward faculty whose work supports Latter-day Saint teachings.
A BYU spokesperson declined to comment on the study and its findings.
Interviews with professors from several departments, however, agreed with the report’s description of an environment in which many students feel hesitant to speak freely in and out of class on hot-button issues.
As one professor, who has taught at BYU for years and asked not to be named for fear of jeopardizing his job, put it: “I’m absolutely terrified to share my own thoughts, and I believe that students are also equally scared.”
This is especially true, some of those interviewed said, for women, racial minorities and students who belong to the LGBTQ community. When students do speak up with views or experiences that challenge those of some of their classmates, the professors observed, they often are met with accusations of being divisive.
Debate vs. doctrine
(George Frey | Special to The Tribune) Students and others gather at BYU in 2020 to protest the school's LGBTQ policies. A new report examines freedom of expression on the Provo campus.
Mireya Lavender is one such student.
A senior from Arizona who identifies as a liberal, the 24-year-old said she has almost given up trying to share her views and experiences in class.
Almost — but not entirely.
Her design classes, held just off the main campus, have become her haven, Lavender said, a place where she can breathe more easily and express her thoughts more freely.
“This is a general common topic of conversation among other people in the majors in that building,” she said. “We all feel a lot safer” in the West Campus Central Building, which houses the art department.
In contrast, attending the main campus for general electives fills her with “dread.”
Part of it has to do with professors, whom she characterized as being generally less interested in open debate than making sure students “download a set of information that has been approved.”
At the beginning of the current semester, she said, her religion professor provided everyone with an approved list of resources for study on class topics. Scrutinizing the list, Lavender realized all of them were BYU or church sources.
“I also just get the sense that maybe bringing up those alternative ideas isn’t necessarily welcome in class,” she said, “because it would detract from the themes.”
Professors are hardly the only — or even necessarily the biggest — impediment to her feeling like she can voice her views on sensitive subjects.
This is especially true for anything related to gender and sexuality, including gender roles. “Asking more questions about women’s experiences” is another no-go, Lavender said, along with LGBTQ issues and anything that might come across as trying to “paint the church in a negative light.”
“I feel the pressure from students pretty strongly because it feels like there’ll be a lack of ability to hear or engage with opinions that differ from theirs,” she said, “and maybe a sense of hostility also if I were to say something that differs from their viewpoint or a church-sanctioned viewpoint.”
‘Condescension toward conservatism’
(Joshua Carr) Joshua Carr, a conservative "free speech absolutist" wishes BYU did more to foster engagement and activism on campus.
Joshua Carr is a conservative “free speech absolutist” majoring in broadcast journalism with a minor in political science.
The 23-year-old Provo native said he wasn’t necessarily surprised to hear that some liberal students don’t always feel comfortable sharing their opinion.
“I’ve had conservative professors where I could see some liberal students feeling like they couldn’t speak as openly in those classes,” he said. “But…it was easy for me.”
That’s not universally the case. Like Lavender, he said much of the environment depends on the department and the teacher.
For instance, Carr said, he has found that his views are generally less welcome in his political science classes, “not because [teachers] try to shout students down, but because there is a general vibe of condescension toward conservatism.”
In those moments, Carr said, he doesn’t feel inclined to engage in a debate — less out of fear of repercussions than a sense that the effort isn’t worth it.
“It just doesn’t matter because, at the end of the day, it’s 20 students,” he said. “And in today’s age, you can go make a YouTube video that reaches 5,000 people.”
More concerning to Carr is what he sees as the lack of political engagement and dialogue generally at BYU — a phenomenon he tied to the church’s reluctance to put its thumb on the scale one way or another.
“I understand that, on one hand, the church has to be smart and be neutral politically,” he reasoned. “But on the other hand, when you’re not having any conversations, that doesn’t breed academic success. It doesn’t breed a healthy society either.”
Steps he would like to see the school take include inviting more political thinkers and lawmakers to speak on campus and to make it easier for activist organizations to set up chapters at the school.
Tensions around Gaza
The FIRE/College Pulse study polled students (nearly 500 at BYU, selected from a student body of nearly 33,000 undergraduates) and on a range of issues — from abortion to immigration.
Also included in this list was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an issue that has grown more flammable since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas that killed nearly 1,200 Israelis, and Israel’s ongoing attacks in Gaza, parts of the West Bank and now Lebanon, which some estimate have killed more than 40,000.
Across the country, the report writes, “students, student groups and faculty who expressed pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian sentiment were targeted for sanction by their peers, administrators and elected officials.”
And yet, for Charlie Jacobson, a 27-year-old Jewish BYU law student, the issue hasn’t come up all that much in or out of class.
“People don’t really ask,” she explained, and the Detroit native, who has complicated feelings about the war, doesn’t go out of her way to bring it up.
“It could either be that I bring something up, and it’s very well received,” she said. “Or the opposite could happen. And if it’s the opposite, I don’t really have the bandwidth to stand on an island.”
Sama Salah, an Egyptian Muslim undergraduate student from Lehi, has taken a different tack.
Both online and off, the 20-year-old does not “shy away from sharing my opinion” about “Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”
(Sama Salah) Sama Salah is a Muslim BYU student who has received support and pushback for her criticism of Israel's war on Gaza and, more recently, Lebanon.
In response, Salah said, she has received the support of a “handful of faculty members” plus a group of friends who “don’t question my humanity or the humanity of my people.”
The administration, meanwhile, has never interfered, she said “with my freedom of speech.”
That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any pushback.
Individual students and alumni have, Salah said, shared images of her on social media alongside accusations that she is pro-Hamas, anti-Christian and a “terrorist.”
At one point, Salah said she and other Muslim students submitted a report about her experience to BYU leadership. The response from the school was reassuring.
“Every single person [in the administration] we talked to was like, we know who you guys are,” she recalled. “We know how beautiful your culture is and…we support you guys.”
Other Utah schools
The University of Utah came in just below BYU with an overall score of 25.5. But this was based on a far smaller sample size (101 of 28,000 undergraduates). Of those polled, nearly half said they self-censored on campus.
Said an unnamed student in the report: “I do not feel like my Christian views or my questions about transgender topics have a safe place to be explored or included in discussion.”
U. spokesperson Rebecca Walsh noted that the state’s premier public university has launched a range of initiatives aimed at fostering free debate, including across political and religious divides.
Stressing the study’s sample size, Walsh added: “We want all our students and faculty to feel encouraged to engage in robust discussion of the topics of the day and emerging social issues. This includes healthy discourse and debate about sometimes controversial ideas and beliefs from all sides of the political and religious spectrums.”
A sampling of 155 Utah State University students yielded a significantly higher score of 51.4. The Logan school has nearly 26,000 undergraduates.
Leading the report’s highest-scoring schools was the University of Virginia at 73.41, followed by Michigan Technological University, Florida State University, Eastern Kentucky University and Georgia Institute of Technology.
At the bottom were some of the nation’s most elite schools, including the Ivy League’s Harvard and Columbia, which tied at 0.008, and the University of Pennsylvania.
On the whole, “very liberal” students, regardless of the campus, were much more likely, compared with their conservative counterparts, to condone the shouting down of a speaker whose views they deemed intolerable or blocking other students from attending the individual’s speech.
More conservative students, meanwhile, were more likely to report self-censoring “fairly” or “very” often on campus, including in conversations with professors.
Overall, students ranked the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, followed by abortion and transgender rights/issues as the three most difficult issues to discuss at school.
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