Local colleges get slammed on free speech issues. But the reality is much more complicated.

Boston College and Northeastern University have been given failing grades for free speech, according to the latest annual survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, which ranks student perceptions of free speech on more than 260 college campuses. But some experts say the larger debate is more nuanced than a couple of local universities ranking last on a free speech survey. For more on this, GBH’s Morning Edition host Tori Bedford spoke with Kent Greenfield is a Boston College law professor specializing in the First Amendment. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Tori Bedford: So, what’s the big takeaway here?

Kent Greenfield: One of the difficulties that I have with the FIRE rankings is that they paint with a broad brush. And I think FIRE’s rankings sort of throw all that speech into one bucket and says speech is good and restrictions on speech are bad. I think one of the things that’s missing in this conversation often is that universities — yes, they are communities where we are seeking truth.

Bedford: What about this larger ethos of colleges being a place where people can express themselves freely and have difficult conversations and expand their minds around ideas that they find challenging?

Greenfield: Well, one of the things that’s really important about a university is you’re exposed to new ideas, exposed to people you didn’t know and didn’t encounter and interact with in your prior experience. So, I think all that is a really good thing. Thinking about those Gaza protests, I mean, one of the things that FIRE asks is, “Is it difficult to discuss?” Of course it’s difficult to discuss. It’s difficult to discuss in every setting. So I don’t think that proves anything. And then the University of Chicago is actually my law school alma mater, was ranked first in FIRE’s ranking, but Chicago disassembled their encampment too. So, there’s no one answer for all of these situations. I think this is much trickier than the FIRE rankings purport to represent.

Bedford: I saw in the study that the percentage of students who said it was acceptable to shout down a speaker, block entry to a campus speech, or use violence to stop a campus speech declined slightly from what I guess was a record high last year. I think it’s really interesting to see this decline, and I’m curious what you think, which factors are involved here.

Greenfield: Well, I think this is tricky too. One of the touchstones of free speech thinking and philosophy is that the best remedy for offensive speech is counterspeech. So, to the extent that students are saying, “Look, we reserve the right to speak out counter to those who are on campus who are engaging in speech that [we] find offensive or problematic,” that’s not a failure of free speech. That’s the embodiment of free speech. Of course, I think violence is a different thing. Disruption of events raises different concerns. But I do think the counter-speech is completely within the framework of free speech norms. People should expect to bear some cost for what they say. I’m not talking about throwing them in jail or fining them or what have you. But if we’re talking about peer pressure, if we’re talking about counterspeech, that’s part of how the First Amendment and free speech philosophy succeeds.

Bedford: So, the universities that are publicly funded, they have certain restrictions within constitutional protections. But a lot of these protests that came out at private universities were about the university’s investments into the government and investments into Israeli-backed businesses and the Israeli military. And all of this is happening under the umbrella of the Trump administration. So one of the biggest concerns that comes out of this is that institutions within that government structure could be participating in what Timothy Snyder calls anticipatory obedience, where they are trying to appease what the government wants, even though students are raising their voices, those students are then getting punished by the powerful institution for their free speech.

Greenfield: Yeah, Tori, I think this is a really important point that you raise. I do believe that we in the educational field are facing a really, really serious attack on our prerogatives and our uniqueness around the world as educational institutions. I’ve never seen more educational institutions more worried about retaliation from the government than I see now. We see a number of universities — Brown, Columbia, Penn, others — who are entering into deals with the Trump administration. And part of the exchange that the university is giving up is things that I think are within their First Amendment rights, pursuit of diversity and inclusion initiatives, for example. So I think we are in a really dangerous time with regard to free speech. So in that respect, I agree wholeheartedly with FIRE. We are in a dangerous moment. Having said that, the commitments that the university has to its community members, its faculty, its staff, its researchers, its students should be maintained through this era. And in fact, I do think that law firms, journalists, professors, universities have an obligation to stand up to the Trump administration, to fight back against these pressures in this moment. Courage is contagious, but so is cowardice.

Bedford: Don’t universities also have an obligation? You said, we all have an obligation, but the universities themselves, they all need to gather together against this, right? By censoring certain speech on campus, are they not doing the opposite of that?

Greenfield: Well, I think that’s the risk. If it means that the universities have to bear down harder on student speech that heretofore has been protected and cultivated even by universities, I think that’s a bad sign of the moment that we are in.

Bedford: Yeah, I guess the bigger question is, where’s the line?

Greenfield: Well, the one point that I want to emphasize is that that line-drawing problem is everywhere in the First Amendment. And traditionally, with private institutions, the line-drawing obligation falls to the institution itself, because in this space, they are rights holders vis-à-vis the government.