The Free Speech Project (FSP), based out of Georgetown University, attempts to document “incidents in which Free Speech has been challenged or compromised in recent years, and collect analysis from various points of view of the struggle to sustain First Amendment Values.”
This is a great initiative. In fact, Heterodox Academy recently ran a post emphasizing the importance of projects like this: if we want to understand the scope of the problem – and how it is evolving – we need to be looking at behaviors, rather than whether or not people say they support free speech in polls. Many who strongly support civil liberties in the abstract are perfectly happy to declare “states of exception” against those they detest in the “real world.”
So far, FSP’s “Free Speech Tracker” has pulled together 137 incidents of (attempted) free-speech suppression. Nearly 2/3 of these (88) occurred on college campuses.
Surveying just over 90 incidents from this database in a recent Medium post, FSP Director Sanford Ungar came to the following conclusions: