The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has released a new report titled “Scholars Under Fire: Attempts to Sanction Scholars from 2000 to 2022.” The gist of the report is that academics at colleges and universities are increasingly being singled out for punishment, often by their own students.

FIRE looked at over 1,000 attempts to punish scholars which it has cataloged since 2000 and found that these efforts started rising a few years ago and peaked in 2021. Here’s a chart created by FIRE that shows the trend.

Here’s a bit of what the report has to say about the trend.

Comparing the frequency of sanction attempts over longer time-spans in the early 2000’s to shorter ones in later years puts their increasing frequency in stark relief: In the span of 10 years (2000-2009) there were 108 sanction attempts; then, in the span of five years (2000-2009) there were 121; and in the span of just two years (2015-2016) there were 90…

The most noticeable spike in sanction attempts occurred in 2020 and can primarily be attributed to George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that May. Of the 151 sanction attempts that occurred in 2020, 87 occurred in response to race-related expression (58%) — a figure more than double the 42 sanction attempts due to race-related expression in 2019 (48%)…

In 2020, undergraduates in particular ramped up their efforts to sanction scholars — from 45 attempts in 2019 to 79 in 2020 — and accounted for more than half of the 151 sanction attempts.

The schools with the most attempted sanctions are the ones you would probably guess would be on this list.

The school with the highest number of sanction attempts was Harvard (23), followed by Stanford (22), UCLA (19), and Georgetown (16). Harvard took the lead in 2022 by canceling a public lecture because of the scholar’s unrelated views on gender and transgender issues. The school with the highest number of successful sanctions was also Harvard (12), followed by the University of Central Florida (10), and Columbia, UCLA, and the University of Florida (tied at 9).

For most of the past 23 years, these sanction attempts were coming primarily from the left. However, that changed in 2021 (the peak year) when Turning Point USA set up something called Professor Watchlist which targeted 61 professors that year. Specifically, FIRE reports that some of the professors on that list have pages that include phone numbers and encouragements to call and complain. So while being on the list alone wasn’t considered an attempt to sanction, being on the list with phone numbers was considered an attempt to sanction.

FIRE notes that the addition of these attempts from TPUSA is the real reason the graph peaked in 2021 and then declined last year.

…the peak of 213 sanction attempts in 2021 is somewhat illusory. If these 61 attempts were excluded from 2021 the total number of sanction attempts would be 152, one more than the 151 in 2020 and seven more than the 145 in 2022.

In terms of longer-term trends, the past three years account for almost half of all sanction attempts since 2000 (509 total, or 47%). The total number of sanction attempts that have occurred in this time period has already exceeded the previous decade’s total of 463 (43% of all sanction attempts).

Generally speaking, more of the sanction attempts overall come from the left (52%) and most of those come from students or other faculty. The sanction attempts from the right (41%) generally come from off-campus groups or elected officials. Here’s a graph showing that attempts by both sides seem to be rising, though the right is usually trailing the left.

I don’t think this is good regardless of which side it’s coming from. But as someone who as been watching this closely since 2017, it seems to me the media, especially the left-leaning media, was happy to ignore these sanction attempts against academics and campus speakers for most of the past 6-8 years. It wasn’t until fairly recently, when they were able to turn the tables and argue the right was doing it too, that more journalists and commentators on the left began to acknowledge there might be a problem.

There’s a lot more detail to the report which you can read in full here.