Over 70% of Indiana University surveyed faculty reported it is not very or not at all clear that IU administration protects free speech on campus. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey Report, “Silence in the Classroom,” was released Thursday. Between March and May of this year — around the time of the pro-Palestinian encampment protests in Dunn Meadow — 165 faculty responded to FIRE’s 53 question survey with topics related to free expression and academic freedom.
According to the survey, 69% of respondents reported thinking that academic freedom is either “not at all secure” or “not very secure.” 34% of faculty reported they had recently changed their writing “for fear of causing controversy.” Additionally, 57% support the adoption of institutional neutrality, the idea that universities should typically abstain from taking positions on social and political issues.
Additionally, 19% of surveyed faculty reported they have been disciplined or threatened with discipline for “their research, teaching, talks outside the classroom to an academic audience, and/or speech outside the university purview.”
“Although I am more in the middle of the road and have viewpoints on both sides, I feel like I need to keep my mouth shut or I would be ostracized or fired,” one IU professor quoted in the survey said.
In September, FIRE released the report, “2025 College Free Speech Rankings,” that detailed responses from students about free speech on their college campuses, as well as FIRE’s own findings about the universities’ free speech policies and actions.
In this report, IU placed 243 out of 251 universities in the United States for free speech. In FIRE’s 2024 report, IU was ranked 225 out of 248 schools, with a below average “speech climate.” IU ranked second to last among public universities nationally, and among four schools in Indiana, IU ranked last. Purdue University ranked 30 and DePauw University ranked 36. The University of Notre Dame ranked 167.
IU received a “yellow light” rating, indicating the university has “at least one policy that places a clear restriction on a more limited amount of protected expression,” or that has a policy with vague wording that “could too easily be used to restrict protected expression,” the report states. However, the report did not name the specific policies that met these criteria.
The faculty survey found that the most difficult issue to discuss on IU’s campus, according to faculty, are the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” with 83% of surveyed faculty reporting this. The next most difficult issue reported by faculty was “affirmative action” (57%) and “racial inequality” (52%).
Along with this, the survey found that 64% of IU faculty identify as liberal, 18% identify as moderate, 14% identify as conservative and the remaining 4% did not align with any of these options.
During the state budget committee meeting on Nov. 13, IU President Pamela Whitten said IU privileges free speech and that the university had a history of “sporadically and sometimes not enforcing” policies on free expression before it changed its policy.
“We want people to be able to say what they want to say but it needs to be done in ways that aren't disruptive,” Whitten said at the meeting.
A July 29 statement from the Board of Trustees clarified that the new Expressive Activity Policy only supported protests that don’t “substantially disrupt university operations” or curb free speech from other people. More information about the university’s free speech policies can be found on the university’s FAQ page.
The report stated that it surveyed faculty from 55 schools in the U.S., each chosen for being the “most elite private institutions and many flagship state universities.” FIRE invited over 100,000 faculty across the U.S. to participate in the survey, garnering 6,269 total responses.
Out of the total responses across all 55 universities, 87% reported having difficulty having open and honest conversations on campus about at least one controversial political topic.
One of the report’s most notable findings was that 35% of total faculty surveyed reported toning down their writings to avoid controversy. According to the report, this number is four times the rate of social scientists during the era of McCarthyism at the height of the Red Scare in the 1940s and 1950s, citing the 1958 book "The Academic Mind: Social Scientists in a Time of Crisis" by Paul Felix Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens, Jr.
“This is where faculty in some university systems were being forced to sign loyalty oaths, or loyalty pledges. Political litmus tests were a popular thing back then to affirm their loyalties to the United States, to disavow the Communist Party, things of that nature,” the principal investigator for the study, Nathan Honeycutt, said. “It was a difficult time for higher education. Kind of a lot of tension, even if most faculty weren't communists.”
Despite this, Honeycutt said, 9% of social scientists during this time reported toning down their writing for fear of causing controversy.
“When we see now that about one in three faculty are now saying that they tone down their writing, so four times as much, to us, that's pretty concerning because the dynamics today, they're not the same,” Honeycutt said. “Something’s amiss.”
Of the total faculty surveyed, 47% of conservative faculty reported feeling like they couldn’t share their opinions due to other’s reactions, while only 19% of liberal faculty reported the same.
Along with this, 13 times more faculty reported that a conservative faculty member would be a poor fit in their department compared to a liberal.
According to Honeycutt, the purpose of FIRE’s reports and research are to “be a pulling back of the curtain,” to show what the current state of college campuses are. He also said he hopes the data will help faculty to know that they are not alone in their concerns about issues regarding free expression and academic freedom and encourage them to speak up about it.
Honeycutt referenced the phrase, “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” saying that data reveals how people feel. He hopes the release of this data will not only encourage faculty and students to speak out, but that it will encourage universities to “be open minded and pursuing a culture on campus that embraces free inquiry and curiosity and openness to new ideas.
He pointed to the University of South Carolina as an example. In FIRE’s 2024 College Free Speech Rankings, the University of South Carolina ranked third to last, 246 out of 248 in free speech. According to Honeycutt, after the school saw how poorly they ranked, they passed policies and made statements to change.
One year later, in the 2025 College Free Speech Rankings released this September, they ranked 34 out of 251 and were given “green light” status.
Honeycutt compared this to Harvard University, which ranked last in the 2024 report, and then continued to rank last in the 2025 report with the same “Abysmal” rating.
“I would hope that if this is a stamp in time of what the current environment is like, that when we check again down the road, that things will have improved,” Honeycutt said.
