Opinion: A year after Charlie Kirk's killing, colleges are still failing the free-speech test

Every September for seven years, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has surveyed tens of thousands of college students and turned the results into a report card on campus speech climates. This year's edition, the 2027 College Free Speech Rankings, released September 9, carries a grim but familiar bottom line: 121 of 261 ranked schools earned an F, and the average score, 61.36 out of 100, still translates to a D-. What is new this year is the reason the report gives for some of the worst individual scores. A full year after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University, his death has become the newest topic American students say they cannot safely discuss on their own campuses — and several universities made that problem worse by firing the faculty who tried.

A second flashpoint joins the first

FIRE's rankings have tracked difficulty discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for several years; this year, at 61 of the 261 ranked schools, a majority of students said the same about Kirk's assassination. The organization's own framing is unambiguous about where responsibility lies. Chief researcher Sean Stevens wrote that the killing became, for many administrators, an occasion for retrenchment rather than reflection.

"Rather than view the tragedy as a warning about the extreme results of partisanship and inability to peacefully engage in dialogue, many college admins took it as an invitation to double down on censorship."

Nine schools lost ranking points specifically for punishing faculty over comments about Kirk's death, according to the report. FIRE President Greg Lukianoff summed up the broader climate bluntly: "college administrators wield their power to cancel controversial speakers, cave to government or student calls for censorship, and limit academic freedom." Vice President of Research Angela Erickson added a data point that captures the trust gap driving the decline: only 40 percent of students said it was "extremely" or "very" clear that their administration protects free speech.

Five firings, one pattern

The specifics are worth walking through, because they repeat with unusual consistency. At the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, anthropology professor Tamar Shirinian called Kirk a "disgusting psychopath" on what she believed was a private Facebook account; the university moved to fire her within days, she sued in federal court alleging a First Amendment violation, and the case — Shirinian v. Plowman, filed in the Eastern District of Tennessee — ended this June with the university's Board of Trustees approving a $1.9 million settlement. At Austin Peay State University, theater professor Darren Michael reposted a Kirk quote about gun deaths with a single ellipsis for commentary; he was fired the same day a U.S. senator amplified the post, then reinstated in December with a $500,000 settlement and a university statement acknowledging it had skipped its own tenure-termination procedures.

At Clemson, assistant professor Joshua Bregy shared another user's critical post about Kirk and was terminated; South Carolina's ACLU affiliate represented him, and the university ultimately rescinded the termination and settled, agreeing to continue his pay and benefits. At Emory, medical school professor Anna Kenney was dismissed after writing "good riddance" about Kirk's death; the university's own Committee for Open Expression, created under a policy Emory adopted just months earlier, concluded the firing likely violated that policy, a finding Duke Law's Campus Speech Incidents database has tracked alongside the litigation that followed. A fifth case, at the University of South Dakota, followed the same script.

In every instance the sequence was identical: an ugly but nonthreatening comment, a swift termination driven by outside political pressure rather than any established disciplinary process, and — once the matter reached a court, an internal faculty body, or an outside legal advocate — an institutional retreat. Inside Higher Ed and other outlets covering the Austin Peay reversal noted that the university's own statement of regret focused not on the content of Michael's post but on the fact that it had bypassed the tenure protections it was contractually bound to follow.

Losing on principle and on the merits

What should trouble people across the political spectrum is not merely that five universities got sued and lost. It is that none of these terminations advanced any coherent institutional value. The professors' comments were, by any normal measure, tasteless and cruel to say about a man's family in the immediate aftermath of his murder. But taste is not the legal or academic standard, and administrators who fire people for off-duty, non-threatening speech — instead of using existing tenure and disciplinary procedures — are not protecting students or restoring civility. They are substituting a political weather check for due process, and then paying seven-figure settlements, funded in several cases by public university budgets, when that check turns out to be unconstitutional or a breach of contract.

That failure mode connects directly to FIRE's broader findings this year. The same climate that produced a one-in-three tolerance for using violence to shut down a campus speaker, and majorities at many schools who now say they cannot discuss either the Middle East or a domestic assassination without fear, is not going to be repaired by administrators who respond to each controversy with the fastest possible termination. If anything, firings taken under political duress teach students the opposite lesson from the one free-speech advocates want them to learn: that institutional protection for expression is negotiable, and depends on who is watching and how loudly they object.

The narrower, harder standard

The fix FIRE's own rankings imply is not complicated, even if it is politically uncomfortable to apply consistently. Public universities are bound by the First Amendment regardless of how offensive a professor's off-duty remarks are; private ones that have adopted open-expression policies, as Emory had, are bound by their own commitments. Neither obligation evaporates because the speech in question concerns an assassinated public figure rather than a foreign war. Tenure and disciplinary processes exist precisely so that termination decisions are not made in the 48 hours after a controversy trends on social media, and the settlements at Tennessee, Austin Peay, and Clemson are the direct, quantifiable cost of skipping that process rather than following it.

A university that wants to show up higher than a D- next September does not need a new speech code or a new list of forbidden topics. It needs administrators willing to let existing procedures run their course even when a comment is repugnant and a state senator is unhappy about it — because the alternative, as this year's rankings and this year's settlement checks both demonstrate, is a climate where everyone, right and left, has learned that the safest thing to say on campus is nothing at all.